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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/bestsermons192400unse 


Best Sermons 
1924 


Edited with Introduction and Biographical Notes by 


Joseph Fort Newton 
(DTDs) LitteDs) 
Church of the Divine Paternity, New York 
Author of ‘‘ Some Living Masters of the Pulpit,’’ ‘‘ Preaching 
in London,’’ ‘‘ Preaching in New York,’’ ‘‘ The 
Sword of the Spirit,’’ etc. 


LIBRARY OF PRINCETO! 





RCN Ce REE Er = = 





New York 
Harcourt, Brace and Company 


PPREA ETL LIS Swen ene cena ma anger a 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, By 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC, 


Published, September, 1924 
Second printing, November, 1924 


PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY 
RAHWAY, N, J. 


IN THE VESTRY 


For several years past we have had each season 
books of the best poems, the best short stories, the 
best moving pictures, to which it seems worth while 
to add an annual book of the Best Sermons. Such 
a venture is not only timely, but is justified by the 
new interest in the issues of religious faith created 
by the appalling experiences of the last ten years, as 
well as by the debates which have recently agitated 
the churches; and still more by the ancient wistful- 
ness of the human heart and its need for guidance 
in a time of unrest and confusion. 

There are many signs to show that a reaction has 
set in against a too abject absorption in material 
concerns. Things do not satisfy; the soul has its 
rights and demands. Our gay and giddy-paced age, 
finding that the horrible gods of sport and speed and 
splendor have led it astray, upsetting its car of prog- 
ress in a bloody ditch, is turning again to discover, 
as it was said of old: “The kingdom of heaven is 
within.” To re-explore and organize the inner life, 
the better to fit us to cope with the bewildering issues 
of our age, is now a desire, a quest, and a deeply felt 
necessity. 

lil 


In the Vestry 


Where are we in religion? is a question which 
many who do not go to church regularly are asking 
in a mood of bewilderment, as if the old had become 
obsolete and the new not yet real. Manifestly we 
are in the midst of the most astonishing revolution 
in the inner ideal, attitude and outlook of man in 
respect to matters of religious faith since the days 
of Luther, the meaning of which we cannot yet 
measure. Indeed, it goes deeper than the Reforma- 
tion, and its promise of liberation is more wonderful. 
To whom shall men turn in their perplexity and 
yearning if not to the man in the pulpit, and we need 
a book to reveal how noble modern preaching really 
is, when to earnestness the preacher adds insight and 
the art to utter those aspirations which well up in 
every human heart, but which so few can ever ex- 
press. 

Sermons come and go—they are manna for the 
day—but preaching goes on forever. It is a high, 
ineffable office, as valid to-day as at any time in 
the past, and its power will not die while human 
nature is the same. There are sermons that live for 
ages, made immortal by the faith of the preacher, the 
depth of his heart, the clarity of his vision, and the 
magic of his mood. Some of the homilies of Chrys- 
ostom are as fresh to-day as when they fell from his 
lips, and certain notes from the Middle Ages still stir 

1V . 


In the Vestry 


us strangely. The silvery speech of Newman, ascetic 
and austere, devoid of pictorial illustration, with 
nothing but a merciless analysis of human motive and 
an awful unveiling of the Unseen, searches us like a 
flame, The golden voice of Robertson echoes in our 
hearts, and many of the sermons of Beecher and 
Brooks have in them the immortality and joy of 
youth. 

What is the secret of great preaching? Nobody 
knows. It is a mystery past finding out. The wind 
of God blows: the sound is heard, but the source 
is secret. It is not in mere learning, or skill of train- 
ing, or quickness of psychological perception, or 
splendor of oratory. No, no; the secret lies further 
back and deeper down. It is in the soul of the man, 
Spirit-born and God-illumined, his faith hammered 
out on the anvil of experience, his lips touched with 
fire by a coal from an unseen Altar. He is a man 
like the rest, but different: he hears “another Drum- 
mer,” as Thoreau would say. St. Paul put it in one 
shining sentence: “‘Not of men, neither by man, but 
by Jesus Christ and God the Father.” 

Too often, forgetting this fact, we fear that the 
great succession will somehow be broken and lost— 
shattered by changes of thought, by the widening of 
horizons, by the hurried indifference of the world. 
Sometimes it is when the preacher loses what in 


Vv 


In the Vestry 


radio we call “contact”; and that is tragedy. Many 
preachers to-day are so troubled about reconciling 
revelation with the shifting phases of thought that 
they forget the Divine message, as Christian on the 
Hill of Difficulty forgot his scroll. Others shrink 
from declaring the whole counsel of God and are 
shorn of power. And some, alas, infected by the 
nervous, jumpy mind of the time, obsessed by motors, 
movies, and jazz, become but one of the dramatic 
entertainments which the world enjoys for an hour 
and then forgets. Any of these is a surrender, an 
abdication of authority, a loss of leadership. 

But true preaching is helped, not hurt, by length- 
ening vistas of knowledge and the setting back of the 
skyline. Lifting skies of outlook only make the old 
issues more acute and the sharp questions more 
poignant. The preacher must speak in the accent 
and idiom of his age, must know it, love it, and thrill 
with its passion and promise, if he is to minister to 
it. He must feel with the men and women to whom 
he speaks, must know the turns in the road and what 
the pilgrims carry in their packs. But he must also 
know that men do not go to church to hear about 
science, or philosophy, or even literature, much less 
to listen to essays on economics. ‘They go sorely 
needing and sadly seeking something else. They long 
to hear a voice out of the heavens, some one who 

v1 


In the Vestry 


knows the things eye hath not seen nor ear heard. 
They seek, as of old, the healing touch, the forgiving 
word, the Hand stretched out in the darkness, which 
makes them know that they are not alone in their 
struggle for the good. 

Such is the business of true preaching in every 
generation; and there is much more of it than we 
think. Many of the best sermons are neither written 
nor reported, and live only in the hearts of those 
who heard them. And not all great sermons are 
preached in great churches. One of the most thrill- 
ing sermons [ ever heard was preached by a simple, 
uncultured man in a little white country meeting- 
house to a congregation of farmers and their fami- 
lies. The preacher took for his text the words of 
St. Paul: ‘Ye are God’s husbandry.” The trouble, 
he said, is that we want to be the Farmer, not the 
farm, to boss and not obey. He broke English gram- 
mar into forty-seven pieces, but he got his message 
through in a way his people saw, felt, and under- 
stood—it was tremendous! Thirty-five years have 
come and gone, but the sermon has been both meat 
and medicine to one lad who listened. 

The sermons in this book, selected from a profu- 
sion of riches, show us a goodly, gracious company 
of preachers, very unlike one another in outlook, in 
method, and in gifts: young men of dawning genius, 

Vil 


In the Vestry 


men in the full flight of mid-career, and veterans 
with ripe and serene vision. Hardly an echo of re- 
cent debates is heard in these pages. One would not 
find it easy to tell to what churches the preachers 
belong, if the labels were left off. They are not con- 
cerned with dogmas that divide, but with the issues 
and perplexities of life as men live it to-day; and 
above all with the problem of redemption in its tragic 
and gigantic modern setting. In every sermon there 
is the same loyalty to the personality and principles 
of Jesus who, in spite of all our energy and invention 
—radium, radio, and the rest—has in His keeping 
the one secret the world needs to know. About Him 
these preachers gather; in His name they speak, each 
with his own insight and eloquence, in behalf of a 
common faith which underlies all creeds and over- 
arches all sects. 

The first and last sermons in this book take the 
same text: “In Thy light shall we see light,” as if 
both preachers saw what all men must more and more 
feel, that what our tangled times need is an alto- 
gether other dimension of religion, if we are to heal 
the world of war and establish a kingdom of goodwill 
among races, classes, and sects: more Light, more 
Love, more Understanding—light to show us the 
unity of faith underlying our differing points and 
points of view, love to unite us in fraternity of service 

V1 


In the Vestry 


and liberty of spirit, and an understanding of Jesus, 
who is the Way of Love, the Truth that sets us free, 
and the Life that interprets life. 

JosEPH Fort NEWTON. 


Church of the Divine Paternity, 
New York City. 


1X 


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Publisher’s Note 


This volume represents the church year 1923- 
1924: from annual conference to annua! conference. 


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CONTENTS 


The Revealing Light:.....:.... W. Russell Bowte..... I 
Psalm 36: 9 

iene Priceoor the Best... 20... Gaius Glenn Atkins... 27 
Matt. 13: 45, 46 

Whe wpuryival of Haith. ss. 5... Richard Roberts ..... 49 
Luke 18: 8 

he saltotsthe Barth: .'.:..:... Ralph W. Sockman... 65 
Matt. 5: 13 

Peer ML OPISt ey. ao eos se 4 alate Harry Emerson Fosdick 8t 
John 6: 68, 69 

“The Mountains of God”....... Charles W. Gilkey.... 101 
Psalm 36: 5, 6 

The Old-Time Religion......... Halford E. Luccock... 123 
Hebrews 11: 8; Exodus 5: 1 “ 

The Bleeding Vine............. Newell Dwight Hillis... 139 
Luke 7: 38, 39, 50 

SE Rer gama AS WOK «).45.tea e's «sae John Edward Bushnell. 159 
Genesis 3: 24 

OnJoving an Enemy. 3/20 .3)5 36. Robert Norwood ..... 173 
Exodus 33: 23; Matt. 5: 44 

The Radicalism of Jesus........ Hobart D. McKeehan. 187 
Matt..§- 21.22: Mark 7: 27 

The Younger Generation........ Herbert E. Hawkes... 201 
Matt. 16: 25 

The Supreme Loyalty.......... FPnest Dal ile ya 217 
Matt. 10: 37 

The Sources of Surplus Power in 

PUMA LG eae easy tes James Gordon Gilkey.. 237 


John 10: 10 © 


Contents 


Knee-Deep in June........4..: 
Matth:24:52'2 52.3 

The Realism and Idealism of 

Mahe ie One Nein, Wace arenes ay 

Matt: 277465) onn 20.017 

The Nature of Religion......... 
Hebrews 1: I, 2 

The) ‘True, 'Protestantism .\ oti) 
Romans I: 17 

The Ultimate Ground of Hope... 
Romans 15: 13 

A Scrap or Sunsets Aiea eee 
Psalm 36:9; 2 Cor. 4: 6 


xiv 


Frederick F. Shannon. 
Lynn Harold Hough... 
William P,. Merrill.... 
George A. Gordon..... 


James Percival Huget.. 


pace 
257 
275 
299 
313 
331 


343 





THE REVEALING LIGHT 


A Virginian by birth and tradition—born in Richmond in 
1882, trained in Harvard University and in Union Theological 
Seminary in Virginia—Dr. Bowie is in the prime and flower of 
a remarkable career.» He became a priest of the Episcopal 
Church in rgo9, and three years later began a notable ministry 
in St. Paul’s Church, Richmond, an adept in the difficult art 
of preaching to children, as well as to adults, as his books of 
sermons, especially The Children’s Year, testify. During the 
Great War he was chaplain of Base Hospital No. 45, and after 
the war added to his labors the editorship of The Southern 
Churchman. In 1923 he became Rector of Grace Church, New 
York City, and quickly won a place of influence and leadership 
in the most challenging field of religious work in America. New 
York may be “a graveyard of preachers,” but it will not 
inter the Rector of old Grace Church, whose genius makes him 
a captain of those forces fighting to stem the tide of paganism 
in our chief city. No one can read the sermon here given 
without feeling that he is a preacher of persuasive charm and 
power, who unites spiritual vision with grace of literary art— 
the personality of the prophet transfiguring the teaching of his 
words like the soft glow of an altar light. 


THE REVEALING LIGHT 


W. RUSSELL BOWIE, D.D. 
GRACE EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NEW YORK 


In thy light shall we see light. Psalm 36: 9. 


At the end of the published letters of Franklin K. 
Lane there is a fragment of a memorandum which 
he wrote and left unfinished on the day before his 
death. He has set down in that memorandum his 
brooding thought of what he should like to know 
if he passed into that other land beyond this one and 
could commune with the great spirits there—if, for 
example, he should stand in the presence of Aristotle, 
that mighty master of human thought. “Ah,” he 
writes, ‘there would be a man to talk with! I think 
that I would not expect that he could tell the reason 
why the way began nor where it would end. That is 
divine business. Yet for the free-going of the mind, 
it would lend such impulse to see clearly.” 

Surely there are many who would find the echo 
of their own desire in words like those. ‘It would 
lend such impulse to see clearly.” We grope and 
stumble in the shadows. A man will say of some 
shattering bereavement that falls upon him: “It is 


3 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


all darkness. J cannot find any meaning in the midst 
of it.’ Or some moral perplexity involves life in 
its deep confusion, and one says: “I cannot see any 
light through all its mazes. The paths are obscure. 
There is nothing to show which way to go.” And 
sometimes, not for individuals only, but for a whole 
civilization, the roads of to-morrow may be lost in 
fogs and darkness. There are bewilderments before 
which even the wisest grope and fumble. There is 
no light of clear and steady understanding by which 
reality might be made plain. 

Light. When we use that word, we take up into 
our intellectual and spiritual meanings the metaphor 
of our physical senses. The truth and understanding 
which we want must have for us the values which 
light has as set in contrast with darkness. Let us 
think, then, at the beginning, specifically of what 
those values are. 


I 


In the first place, light means security, as against 
the darkness which is full of fear. Who is there who, 
at some time or other, has not passed through ex- 
periences in which the dark was crowded with its 
nameless terrors? Particularly in times of sickness, 
when the body is weak and all the tides of life are 

4 


The Revealing Light 


low, there come the moments when the pressure 
of the darkness is appalling. Those who have been 
in hospitals in some long weakness, or after an op- 
eration, will remember that. Faint with the after- 
effects of anesthetics, or drawn down from the har- 
borage of normal self-reliance by that strange ebb- 
tide of the bodily forces that sets in when the night 
is deepest and the morning has not yet come, the 
dimmed awareness of the mind floats down in help- 
lessness as toward an ocean, vague and terrible. The 
horizon is filled with troubling shapes that can neither 
be clearly perceived nor yet escaped. The pressure 
of the darkness is like the pressure of heavy throt- 
tling hands. Hour by hour, the eyes may turn to 
the window hungry for the light, and when at last 
it comes, it is as though the spell were broken. The 
commonest sound of awaking life that breaks the 
dead quiet of the night is like a benediction. The 
light brings back the real world again, wakes into 
expression all its comforting and substantial friend- 
liness, restores to eyes haunted by the phantasms of 
the blackness the near look of human faces, and by 
the flood of its brightness lifts the heart from those 
dark channels down which it had drifted, upon the 
brimming and sunlit strength of the returning tide. 
Neither in the darkness nor in the light is there a 
conscious analysis of the effect of either; but the 


5 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


moods which they create have to do with the pro- 
foundest associations of our being. 

In that terror of the dark, which in times of 
strength we may rise so easily above as to forget, but 
to which in the moments of weakness we are sub- 
jected, there climb above the threshold of the sub- 
conscious all those ancient fears that were a part of 
the experience of the race in those remote ages when 
the primitive man struggled uncertainly for the pos- 
session of his earth. Precarious battler for existence 
in wildernesses as yet untamed and terrible, he had 
good reason to dread the dark, under cover of which 
the great beasts prowled, and where the demons be- 
fore which imagination cowered, shrieked and chat- 
tered in the winds and hid in the silence of black 
forests where the stillness was more horrible than 
sound. Grown into the deepest instincts of self- 
preservation was that shrinking from the dark and 
that looking forward to the light of morning which 
the long infancy of the race brought it about that 
men must feel. Therefore, at all times when our 
strength is lowered and our sufficiency is broken, 
the old dread of the dark comes back, and with ut- 
most vividness of experience light becomes the token 
of security against fears which are the more formi- 
dable because they are nameless and obscure. When 
presently, then, we shall consider more specifically 


6 


The Revealing Light 


the religious meaning of our desire for light, we shall 
carry into our thinking this first remembrance of 
what light signifies—peace, well-being, strength, as 
against the dread enslavements which reach hands 
out of the darkness to drag us down. 

In the second place, out of that physical experi- 
ence from which the metaphors of language come, 
we remember that light means not only security 
from surrounding dangers but definite guidance for 
the ends men want to reach. The traveler goes along 
his road. As long as the daylight lasts all is well; 
but the night falls, and then the landmarks disappear. 
The path leads into a forest and vanishes into the 
thick confusion of the trees, or it passes into some 
rocky valley, where its narrow way of safety is no 
longer traceable, and a man must come to a halt for 
fear of precipices over which a false step might 
carry him. The ship drives on its way under the 
fierce pressure of a storm. With light it could see 
the danger of the sea or rock or jutting coast toward 
which it steers; but in the darkness it is so helpless 
that it may point toward peril when it imagines that 
it is steering toward the open sea. In that vivid 
account of that voyage on the Mediterranean with 
which the Book of Acts describes the journey of Paul 
to Rome, it is told how they cast out the anchors 
and “wished for the day.” Likewise many travelers 


7 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


before or since, not only in times of danger but in 
all ordinary efforts to attain their journey’s end, have 
wished for the day. The night means confusion, 
and the haunted or baffled progress. Only the day 
can bring back the light of a guidance that is de- 
pendable. 

In the third place, light is desirable because it 
brings back to the world both its color and its growth. 
Stand before any beautiful thing and watch the day 
decline. Look, for example, from within this Church 
toward any great, glowing window as the sun goes 
down. Little by little the colors fade. All the differ- 
entiation of its beauty sinks and blurs into a dull 
blackness from which all the message and meaning 
have gone. Stand upon a hilltop and watch the tides 
of daylight ebb into the west after the sinking sun 
and see the greenness passing from the fields, the 
golden glory smothered from the horizon, and all the 
color and variance of earth’s brightness turning into 
somberness and dark. And then go by contrast to 
some mountain-top before the sun is risen. See the 
earth spread out below you, deep and still and yet 
expectant, as though touched already by the presage 
that quivers in the breezes of the dawn. Then see 
the first far pennons of the morning lift above the 
east. Watch the golden spearheads of the day march 
through the gates of the horizon and press their level 


8 


The Revealing Light 


conquest down all roads of the retreating shadows, 
while after them streams the occupying splendor of 
the fully risen sun. See then the gray mists lift and 
vanish into the brightness of the sky that is turned 
to blue. See the green come back to the darkness 
of the forest, the glint to the rivers, the color to some 
splash of vivid flowers or to valleys with their squares 
of amber and green. Remember, that as the sunlight 
brings back to the world an infinite variety of loveli- 
ness, so from the sunlight also must all the growing 
things derive their power of life. If the darkness 
endured, they would die. It is because with every 
morning the light returns, pouring out its flood of 
energy, that leaf and stem and twig can draw their 
sustenance from the golden air. 

Such are some of the meanings of light. It is no 
wonder, therefore, that, not in a shallow and vagrant 
way, but with a deep and cosmic consciousness, the 
spirit of man desires it, and desires all those spirit- 
ual realities which have for him the meaning and 
value of light. 

Now the glory and the tragedy of life are linked 
together in the fact that the soul of man is forever 
seeking light and so often failing to find it and losing 
itself in the dark instead. But the beautiful promise 
of religion is that, through rr, light can increasingly 
prevail. The whole Bible is a magnificent expression 


9 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


of that truth. In that sublime imagination of the 
Book of Genesis it begins with a universe without 
form and void, where darkness was upon the face 
of the deep. Over that profound and formless empti- 
ness brooded the Spirit of God. And His first crea- 
tive word was this, “Let there be light.” So the 
Bible begins—a void and darkness, and then a glim- 
mer, the waking of a spark that presently should 
fashion, not only the universe of physical things, but 
the mightier miracle of man with the divine fire burn- 
ing on the altar of his heart. But from the travail of 
that creation with the flicker of its first splendor 
against the mightiness of the void, the story of the 
Bible sweeps on until it culminates in the picture of 
the Holy City, bright with the splendor of a fadeless 
day, where the nations of them that are saved shall 
walk in the light of it, where the kings of the earth do 
bring their glory and honor into it, and where there 
shall be no more night. 

Along the highway of human progress, which 
stretches from that far beginning of the world toward 
the consummation that is to come, moves the figure 
of man. For him too that road is the slow emergence 
out of darkness toward the light. Far yonder is 
Abraham lifting his face toward the stars, reflecting 
in that rapt look of his true glimpses of the eternal, 
yet involved too with the superstitions of that human 


10 


The Revealing Light 


childhood to which he belonged—climbing up with 
Isaac to the altar of sacrifice in the blind instinct that 
made him think that the killing of his first-born 
would be pleasing to God whom ignorantly he groped 
for, yet through the smoke of his blind and terrible 
devotion catching sight again of the truer light of 
God which he would follow. Yonder, at another 
journey on the road, is Jacob, that strange chaotic 
soul, in whom the daylight and the dark were min- 
gled, descending now into low valleys of craftiness 
and deceit, and again emerging on Plains of Bethel 
from which to his wide eyes was revealed the ladder 
of God’s communication, with the brightness of an- 
gels passing up and down. Farther on the road is 
Moses, striking the Egyptian taskmaster down in 
one black moment of his fury, fleeing to hide him- 
self in the obscurity of Midian, beholding there the 
light of the burning bush, going back to Egypt to 
become the leader of his people, before whose soul 
henceforth the guidance of God went on as a pillar 
of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Yonder, 
farther still, are the men of the time of the Judges 
and of the early kingdom, moving through sins that 
oftentimes were dark with ruthless cruelty, yet 
emerging into splendors of heroism like those of Gid- 
eon and Jephthah and of the great king, Saul. Behold 
also that most winsome figure of David, with the 
11 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


brightness of his gallant youth, with the high passions 
of his manhood covering his soul with smoke of evil 
through which he reached his desperate hands toward 
God—seeing, as a man might see the sky through 
broken clouds, the glory of God and the tragic shadow 
of his own human sin—out of the darkness crying 
for the light, through the night of his soul’s bewilder- 
ment, climbing the mountain-tops of passionate de- 
sire and watching for the day! Nearer on the road 
see that other company, the greatest souls which 
then had trodden the highroad of the progress of 
mankind, prophets with their uplifted faces, Amos 
and Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and the others 
who followed in their train. There were men in 
whom the dross of the earth was being burned away 
in the splendor of the light of God, men who, through 
the often unmindful crowd of their contemporaries, 
into temple and common street and courts of kings 
alike, carried in their faces something of the high 
transfigurement of heaven. 

Slowly, as the long road climbs height by height, 
the aspiring figures of the centuries move on. But 
still their eyes are lifted higher, and in the gaze of 
the mightier prophets there is reflected the trium- 
phant wonder of that toward which they moved, and 
which they beheld afar. For on the crest to which 
the road climbs up, there on the ultimate mountain- 


12 


The Revealing Light 


peak of human hope and aspiration, with eyes that 
look down along all the infinite distance of the as- 
cending way, and hands whose mystic power reaches 
out across the centuries to touch and help and lead, 
stands the eternal figure of Him who came out of 
Nazareth. “I am the light of the world,” He says, 
“Fe that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but 
shall have the light of life.” Lifting their eyes to 
Him, men begin to understand the reality of what 
He says. There in the soul of Jesus—in the pur- 
poses which shine in Him; in the light which streams, 
from His Spirit and from His trust in God, upon life’s 
perplexities; in the glory of His redeeming righteous- 
ness as it falls upon the tragedies of human sin—is 
the power that shall ultimately lift the shadows, make 
straight the path before men’s feet, and pour into 
their hearts the strength and the desire to follow. 
Cried St. Paul, “God, who commanded the light to 
shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, 
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God in the face of Jesus Christ.” ‘To the Christian 
mind all the course of history finds its illumination 
and its meaning in Him. The best that we can do, 
as we look to the future, is to carry forward and 
bring into contact with all shadowed human needs, 
that light of the meaning of life as revealed in Jesus. 
And looking backward and interpreting the progress 
13 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


of the human soul, we know that that which it was 
yearning for was that light which came reflected from 
the eternal conception of humanity in God which 
Jesus should at length incarnate. ‘Toward the ten- 
derness of His understanding, toward the strength of 
His compassionate’ redemption, the wistfulness of 
the human spirit has forever pressed forward to 
find that fulfilment which Jesus ultimately brought. 
It is as Robert Browning makes David cry in the 
high rhapsody with which he sought to lift the soul 
of Saul to God. 


He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand 
the most weak. 

*Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that 
T seek 

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, 

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this 
hand 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ 
stand! 


aps 


More definitely, therefore, we can now take hold 
of the implications of our text, “In thy light shall 
we see light.” There is no real meaning for human 
life until upon it streams the light of the meaning of 
God. For us explicitly, as for the multitude of 

14 | 


The Revealing Light 


hungry souls in their far-reaching desire, that light 
is best made plain in the face of Jesus Christ. When 
as Christians we say that He is God of gods and 
Light of Light, we mean that the Infinite Father 
whom we cannot see is like the Jesus of Nazareth 
whom men saw and whom we, in the clear percep- 
tion of faith and obedience, may see to-day. We 
mean that the fullest light, the truest light, the light 
most eternal and unchanging which can shine upon 
our human problems is that which shines from God 
through Him whose soul was the mightiest window 
ever lifted into the temple of the soul of man. 

Remembering, then, those values of light which 
we have already considered, let us think of the light 
of God in Jesus. 

Without the light which comes from the accepted 
presence of Jesus, our world to-day is full and shall 
be full of those vague and growing terrors which 
the primitive mind or the child mind or the broken 
and weakened mind associates with the dark. We 
have let loose in our time many of the primitive im- 
pulses. We have smashed the ladders of civilized 
habits of mind and body by which men had slowly 
climbed to higher levels of behavior, and have let 
the human spirit tumble back to claw and struggle 
for existence down in the morass of primeval sav- 
agery. Europe, through decade after decade, bred 

15 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


the war fever while we sat by unheeding and uncar- 
ing. Upon the garden of a decent life, ordered for 
humanity in reasonable peace and plenty by the 
labors and sacrifices of unnumbered generations, we 
sowed again the seeds of the jungle, and the jungle 
returning upon that garden bids fair in wide portions 
of the world to draw great nations back into the dark 
allurement of its ignorance, its naked ferocity, its 
witchcraft of slaughter and blood. Even stout- 
hearted men come back from Europe almost in de- 
spair. ‘They can see no way out for France, for 
Germany, for Russia. Instead of rebuilding what 
the War has wrecked, great sections of Europe seem 
to be slipping slowly down deeper into the morass. 
The constructive motives, out of which alone a pre- 
eminently satisfying human order might be built, are 
paralyzed. In Philip Gibbs’s More That Must Be 
Told, there is a notable paragraph in which he sets 
forth the failure of European civilization before the 
War to rise to such effective mobilization of the 
higher human motives as might have prevented the 
development of that catastrophe: 


The old men of Europe (not old in years, but in traditions) 
made never an effort to tame the wild beast in the heart of 
Germany (or in their own), never once raised ideals to which 
the German people might rise with a sense of liberty and 
brotherhood from the spell of Junkerdom. They made no kind 


16 | 


The Revealing Light 


of effort to get European civilization out of the jungle darkness 
to new clearing places of light. They were all in the jungle 
together. A friend of mine with bitter cynicism compared the 
international politicians before the War with ape-men, peering 
out of their caves, gibbering and beckoning to friendly apes, 
frothing and mouthing to hostile apes, collecting great stores 
of weapons for defense and offense, strengthening the ap- 
proaches to the monkey rooks, listening with fear to the crash- 
ing of the Great Ape in the undergrowth of his own jungle, 
whispering together with a grave nodding of heads, a plotting 
of white hairs, while the young apes played among the trees 
with the ignorance and carelessness of youth. 


Terrible that metaphor confessedly is, and drawn 
with the bold strokes of impassioned feeling. Yet 
exaggerated and extreme though it appear, it is true, 
as Philip Gibbs goes on to say, that if the Euro- 
pean system were put into the parable of the animal 
world by the spirit of AXsop, or of Swift, or of La 
Fontaine, it is with jungle life or with ape-life that 
it could only be compared. Is it not true that, as 
we regard the international danger points of the 
world to-day, the trouble grows out of the fact that 
there is no clear light by which men see and shape 
their policy—no wide, beneficent, kindly understand- 
ing which includes all the elements of reality and 
reconciles them in some magnanimous truth? Civ- 
ilization cannot be redeemed by fattening the reptile 
or the animal in the policies of nations. As God 
looks down upon the earth to-day, it must be with 


17 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


the infinite and wistful pitifulness of an understand- 
ing which sees the folly of that imagined shrewdness 
which would be ridiculous if it were not so sad. 

It is not that the men who before or since have 
led and may lead great nations down old, bloody 
highroads of disaster, are bad men. No, not that. 
Often they are full of the conventional virtues of the 
would-be patriot. They are lovers of their country 
who sincerely want to advance and maintain what 
they imagine to be the interests of their peoples. 
They are not bad men; but they are blind—blind 
to those mightier truths which are deeper and more 
far-reaching than little shrewd schemes of temporary 
prudence and advantage; blind to those far certainties 
of moral cause and effect which bring their ultimate 
vengeance on those who dare defy them. They 
have looked out upon their world in a kind of light, 
but a narrow and misleading one—a baleful light of 
common plots, and fierce and disingenuous strata- 
gems. The awful realities of these years have made 
it plain that such light as that is only darkness. The 
supposed wisdom of diplomats, plotting selfishly for 
their own countries, has been worse than foolishness. 
It has led the world down into the dark pit of disas- 
ter, and bids fair to thrust it there again in these 
fateful years when the better instincts of the war- 
weary millions are reaching up for something better. 


18 


The Revealing Light 


In those same letters of Franklin K. Lane to which 
we have already once referred, there is another fine 
statement of his worth remembering. ‘We have,” 
he writes, ‘lost all traditional moorings. We have 
no religion. We have no philosophy. We are ma- 
terialists because we have no faith. This thing, 
however, is being changed. We are coming to rec- 
ognize spiritual forces, and I put my hope for the 
future, not in any scheme of government, but in 
the recognition by the people that, after all, there 
is a God in the world.” What is that but to say in 
another fashion what the Psalmist has put in that 
immortal phrase, “In thy light shall we see light’’? 
Our world must find God, if it would find the way 
through chaos and confusion out into the decent 
security of an ordered and peaceful life. It must 
find God as revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. 
It must remember that the greatness of nations will 
not consist in any conscious manipulation, by greed 
or violence, of commercial profit, in financial ag- 
grandizement or extent of territory and military in- 
fluence. The greatness of a nation must consist in 
the spirit of a people set free from brutal self-seeking 
on the one hand and from fear on the other, to de- 
velop its own genius in kindliness and confidence. 
This can never be attained except in a world where 
each people remembers that its welfare is bound 

19 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


up indissolubly with the welfare of all humanity, 
and remembers, too, that there can be no ultimate 
security for any people except in a world which is 
ordered for the good of all. The only practical hope 
for our civilization to-day is that which fools would 
call impracticable. _It is a new spirit, mastering the 
conscience of a people and reflected from them in 
their public servants, a new spirit which will try 
deliberately to bring the mind of Christ to the order- 
ing of our distracted age. 

When men and nations begin to emphasize less 
their supposed rights and to think more deliberately 
of their duties; when they ask not only what they 
owe to their people’s benefit, but what they owe to 
God; when they shape tariffs and formulate foreign 
policies and regulate the dealings of their citizens, 
not with the sinister regard of those who look out 
upon the world to see only what they can get, but 
with the wide vision of those who see that, in this 
human complex whose laws are made by God, only 
those shall finally gain who try to serve and give 
—then we shall set our feet on the road that leads 
to the better day. Great nations have tried to make 
a civilization by selfishness; by greed; by the self- 
sufficiency that leads to violence as Germany’s did, 
or the self-sufficiency that merely shuts itself in cal- 
lous isolation, as ours would do to-day; but these 


20 


The Revealing Light 


things which the vanity of small minds account to 
be wisdom have only been the marsh-lights that led, 
and will lead, into the swamps. What is needed now 
is the real light that can come only from religion. 
Mankind will be saved, not by Mars and not by Mam- 
mon, but by Christ. Redemption will come, not from 
the mailed fist nor from the clutch of any avaricious 
fingers, but only from the touch of the wounded 
hands. 


IIT 


If we need the light of God to deliver our world 
from its fears and from all the dangers hiding in the 
present darkness of its organized hatred, so we need 
the light of God to deliver us from those nearer per- 
plexities that beset men and women in this time. 
The War affected not only our international relation- 
ships, but much of the realm of personal conduct 
as well. It dislocated old ways of thought. It called 
out a certain fierce primitiveness in men and women 
which once released is not easily tamed. It clothed 
itself in the plausible terms of a new psychology and 
philosophy. The personality must be free, we are 
told, from inhibitions. The great thing is for the 
man and woman to express to the full their own 
natural urge for unhampered life. That is the new 

21 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


light in which we are to see light to-day. Old ideas 
of morality, of faithfulness in family life, of self- 
discipline, and fine obedience to something more au- 
thoritative than immediate desire are alleged to be 
out of date. Contemporary books and the contem- 
porary drama are full of the suggestion that the old 
guide-post must be turned away from if the new 
road to freedom is to be found. 

There are a great many people around us to-day 
who have deliberately given up all sense of a religious 
leading for their lives. They do as they please from 
day to day. Some of them are nothing but common 
sensualists, hiding under large words the fundamental 
indecency of lives that are a continual dishonor. 
More of them have the instinctive integrity which 
keeps them from moral disintegration, but they too 
may be lazy, self-indulgent, useless. They contribute 
no saving earnestness to the communities in which 
they live, or rather they hardly live in any community 
at all, but simply move indifferently between one 
place and another, according to the convenience of 
the season and their own restless caprice, sending 
down no roots of loyal attachment into any sur- 
roundings, taking by the power of money, which in 
most cases they themselves did not earn, the most 
extravagant luxuries which the world can give, and 
making no contribution of service in return. Cities 

22 


The Revealing Light 


of America which call themselves Christian have 
their multitudes of these people who in their outlook 
on life are as crudely pagan as though such a thing 
as spiritual conviction had no existence in the world. 

Nevertheless, the old words of the Psalmist come 
with an accent that is stronger and more enduring 
than the chatter by which the vain and shallow try 
to assert the modern distinction of being worthless. 
The trouble with the selfish lives is that the light of 
the supposed instincts which they imagine they can 
follow plays them false. It does not lead to any 
lasting satisfaction, but only into the entanglements, 
disappointments, and ultimate disgust. There are 
men and women around us whose lives seem out- 
wardly to have all that might make for happiness. 
They have wealth, leisure, social opportunity; but 
they are cursed with inward wretchedness. Their 
faces reveal it. Their own hearts know it. They have 
looked at life in false perspective. They need to 
see it in the light of God. They must measure their 
self-indulgence against the strong self-mastery of 
Jesus, their parasitic indolence against His heroic 
and joyous will to serve, their moody pathways of 
Capricious impulse against the clean, firm road of 
conviction which He would help them build. Are 
there not some who listen in this place to-day who 
know that they belong to those whom I describe? 

29 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


Is it not true that you have groped in the twilight 
of a deliberate ungodliness, and that you find your 
feet now in the quicksand of bewilderment? You 
have sought your own self-pleasing, and it has led 
you round in a restless circle back to the same point 
of emptiness from which you started. You have 
tried to appropriate for yourself all the flowers of 
this world’s richness and beauty; but blunderingly 
you have only trampled upon the stems that grew 
them, and the garden to-day is dead beneath your 
feet. The twilight of your disillusionment falls 
about you, and you do not know which way to turn. 
And yet you do know too. You need to turn to the 
light of God in the face of Jesus Christ, to see His 
gentleness and His beauty, His high meaning for 
the life that so easily we make common, His better 
ways of dedication in which He means that you 
should walk! 

Finally, as light means safety and means guid- 
ance, SO, as we have remembered, it means color and 
growth, for things which otherwise would be dark 
and dead. 

If that is so with the landscape of the visible 
world, so also it is true with the landscape of the 
spirit. For the most part, life’s beauty must come, 
if it comes at all, from the common and familiar 
things. For some these have no freshness of sug- 


24 


The Revealing Light 


gestion, no thrill and loveliness of new surprise. 
Work is to them a drab monotony, friendship a dull 
matter of fact, even love of wife or child or hus- 
band or mother a thing which through long accept- 
ance has become common. It is as though a cataract 
had formed on the eyes of the spirit. Realities which 
ought to be full of infinite variety and loveliness are 
seen as in a dull, gray fog. The world of life and 
love is like some island in a sea of darkness to which 
the sunshine never comes. 

Whence does the sunshine come? It comes from 
the consciousness of God. Again in the simplest and 
most familiar experiences, even as in the greatest 
and most far-reaching problems of the world, the old 
sweet words are true, ‘“‘In thy light shall we see light.” 
Let the consciousness of God be born within the 
human soul, let it lift itself on the horizon like the 
dawn, and instantly all the objects which before were 
commonplace are bathed in the new suggestion. 
The work which perhaps was a dull thing indiffer- 
ently regarded becomes the trust of God which 
must be discharged with honor. The petty vexa- 
tions of the day, its minor duties, its interrup- 
tions with their trial to the temper, become also 
a part of God’s opportunity for the spirit’s growth. 
The comradeship of friends, the trust of little chil- 
dren, the love of men and women, become ennobled 


25 


W. Russell Bowie, D.D. 


because the heart, through God, is lifted to nobler 
capacity for appreciation and affection. All human 
beings become more honorable, and even the common 
contacts of the street and shop and the work-room 
become more inspiring because the light of the 
thought of God, shining on those other lives, clothes 
them with significance. In His light we see the 
light in them. 

“For ye were sometimes darkness,’ wrote St. 
Paul. Is that true, perhaps, of many of us who 
think together now? Darkness of fear, of bewilder- 
ment, of the needless lack of color in the life that 
ought to be so colorful and lovely and inspiring? 
“But now,” St. Paul goes on, “are ye light in the 
Lord.” That is the promise of the truth which we 
can claim if, as eager watchers facing toward the 
dawn, we cry for the coming of the glory of God. 
His presence will rise, like the sun, to fill the earth 
and sky with radiance. “In his light shall we see 
light.” 


20 





THE PRICE OF THE BEST 


Dr. Atkins was born in Indiana in 1868, educated at Ohio 
State University, and after graduating from the Cincinnati 
School of Law, studied in Yale Divinity School—entering the 
Congregational ministry in 1895. Two ministries in New Eng- 
land preceded his first pastorate in the First Church of De- 
troit, 1906-10, to which he returned after seven years in the 
Central Church of Providence: an unusual thing to do and 
rather dangerous, but, happily, in this instance an exception to 
all rules. How well I recall a winter day when I read his Pul- 
grims of the Lonely Road, enthralled equally by its knowledge 
of the shadowy path by which man finds his way to God, and 
by the lovely lengths of haunting prose in which so many 
cadences are gathered and bidden to linger. Since then I have 
read everything he has written, from The Godward Side of 
Life to An Undiscovered Country; and in each book there is 
the same richness of matter and distinction of manner. Yes, 
“distinction” is the word to describe all his work. Who else 
among us could have written A Rendezvous with Life, in- 
terpreting the Seeger line in terms of daily task and oppor- 
tunity, and in a fashion hardly less picturesque. Nor would it 
be easy to name another who could have dealt with the varie- 
gated assortment of Modern Religious Cults and Movements 
with such wise sympathy and understanding, making it one of 
the best pieces of work since William James went away. This 
sermon is typical of his genius in its clarity of insight, its 
quiet urgency of appeal, and the gem-bright beauty of style 
with which he tells us of “the Pearl of Eternity,” to use a 
phrase of an old mystic, “for which a man may gladly give all 
that he possesses and which he may buy for no less a price.” 





THE PRICE OF THE BEST 


GAIUS GLENN ATKINS, D.D. 
FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, DETROIT 


“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, 
seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of 
great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.” 
NALG T3745. 40, 


This text is taken from one of a group of parables 
in which Jesus appraises and illustrates the worth 
and character of the Kingdom of Heaven. He never 
really defines it. A definition is a wall we build 
around a word to get its meaning within some un- 
derstandable space, and walls have their limitations. 


Before I build, I would ask to know 
What I was walling in, or walling out, 


Something there is that does not love a wall, 
That wants it down. 


The greatest things cannot thus be shut in. You 
may fence a piece of ground, but never the winds 
which blow across it, nor the drifting shadows of 
the clouds above it. No more can you fence the 
Kingdom of Heaven with a definition. 

29 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


But Jesus is constantly approaching it from 
every side, suggesting values, relationships, analo- 
gies, illustrating and exalting it till its massive con- 
tours lie against the horizons of the Gospels as Mt. © 
Blanc from Chamonix. In the 13th chapter of St. 
Matthew it is the field in which seed is planted, and 
the seed which is sown; it is the leaven which trans- 
forms and the treasure which men seek, and, above 
all, it is the “pearl of great price” for which a man 
may gladly give all that he possesses and which he 
may buy at no less a price. 

The Century Dictionary defines “best” as “‘what- 
ever is of the highest quality, excellence or standing; 
it is said of both persons and things in regard to 
mental, moral, or physical qualities, whether inherent 
or acquired.”” An inclusive definition that, covering 
almost everything, but it fails, as our fences fail to 
shut in the sky. For the best belongs to the ranges 
oi the ideal, bafflingly indefinite, irresistibly com- 
pelling; it is a region of dreams and desires whose 
light is drawn from far and mystic sources, where a 
man may quickly lose himself or mistake a mirage 
for living water, but into which he is bound to ad- 
venture for all that, or else stop short in the journey 
of life. | 

We all want the best, but differ strangely in our 
understandings of it. One man’s best is often enough 


30 


The Price of the Best 


another man’s worst. One man’s best keeps him 
under his own roof-tree, another man’s best makes 
him a wanderer beneath the stars. ‘The saint’s best 
is his soul and the best of the libertine is his appe- 
tites. The best of the scholar is knowledge and the 
best of the money-getter is gold. The best of the 
artist is beauty, the musician’s best is song. Czesar’s 
best is a throne and Jesus’ best is a cross, and yet 
for all such as these the best is a light or a lure, an 
outer excellence or an inner perfection in whose 
quest a man may spend himself utterly and in whose 
possession all his dreams come true. 

It would seem, therefore, that if we might achieve 
amongst us a right understanding of the best and 
create within us the willingness to pay the price of 
it. we should have discovered the secret of the tri- 
umphant conduct of life. But it is impossible to 
separate these two conditions, for the power to know 
the best is also part of its price and we shall come 
directly to the heart of the whole great matter by a 
bit of analysis. The price of the best is, first: the 
power to know it; second: the capacity to labor for 
it; third: the willingness to surrender the lesser 
good for the sake of it. 


31 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


I 


Plato, who also considered such things as these, 
believed that we are come into this present world out 
of some preéxistent state where truth and beauty 
and goodness were the perfect laws of a perfect life 
and what is here the disturbing aspiration of our 
souls was the glad possession of those who had no 
dreams because every dream was reality. Some- 
thing of the recollection of this we have brought 
with us through the narrow gates of rebirth. Be- 
cause the gates are so narrow we have been able to 
bring with us but little of what we then had and 
then were, but, none the less, we have brought some- 
thing. ‘Trailing clouds of glory we have come,” and 
all our visions, splendid as they are and greatly as 
they compel us, are but the haunting memories of 
an existence so splendid and an order so radiant that 
one broken recollection of it all is enough to fill our 
world with glory. 

This is only a poet’s dream, the baseless fabric of 
the meditation of a philosopher whose mighty service 
it is to have forever exalted the value of the ideal 
and to have taught us that we were born for some- 
thing better than the broken and incomplete, pos- 
sessing by divine right a citizenship in a “better, 
that is a Heavenly country.” 

52 


The Price of the Best 


What Plato sought in the past, Jesus Christ dis- 
covers in the future; Plato’s perfections are in 
memory, the perfections of Christ in faith and sac- 
rifice and hope. The sources of Plato’s better world 
are hid in the mists which lie across the land of 
dreams; the sources of the best for Jesus Christ are 
in the nature and power of God. This power of 
ours to build in vision and imagination a better 
world, and to discern beyond what we are the glory 
of what we may become, is what is nearest to God 
in the human soul. 

Some of us have a power to apprehend and make 
manifest the best which is denied the commonalty 
of folk. Such as these are more sensitive to the 
enduring values; they possess insights and under- 
standings which are denied the rest of us; they hear 
more clearly some accent of the Holy Ghost; indeed, 
we only wrap the matter up in words as we go on 
saying such things as this. It is better to use illus- 
trations. A thousand painters have painted the 
faces of old men and women, but only Rembrandt 
has been able to give tired eyes their haunting look 
of eternal longing, and depict on lined faces the 
sorrow, the dignity, and the indefinable wonder of 
our common life. 

We shall never know why Beethoven and Wagner 
and Handel were able to hear in their silences those 


33 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


harmonies to which the rest of us are deaf, and so 
voice them in symphonies and Pilgrim Choruses and 
haunting arias as to make their music like the sound 
of many waters or viewless tides which bear us out, 
as we commit ourselves to them, into regions whose 
pleasures are without material suggestion and whose 
realities belong neither to space nor to time. We do 
not know how Watts was able to paint love and life 
and death in such majestic and moving guise that 
the galleries which house his canvases become a 
temple and our souls confess the magic of the 
painter’s brush. 

We do not know how St. Gaudens models a Shaw 
Memorial or an Abraham Lincoln any more than 
we know how Tennyson was inspired to sing of 
“Sunset and evening star,” or Ruskin to write a 
prose which is luminous with mountain glory or 
somber with mountain gloom, or echoes the music 
of Alpine streams, or recreates the magic of Swiss 
meadows starred with flowers. But, by the grace 
of God, these men and their comrades have been 
able to do such things and so they have created for 
us the best of music and literature and art, as the 
scholars and philosophers have created for us the 
best of truth and knowledge and as the saints have 
created for us the best of conduct and character. 

And if we do not possess within ourselves the 


34 


The Price of the Best 


power to create as they have created, or to see as 
they have seen, we nevertheless do possess the 
power of being taught and disciplined by them. 
There is something within us which responds to 
what they have seen and done as there was a 
supreme excellency in them which responded to 
what God had revealed and done. So we shall 
know the best as we dwell much in their fellow- 
ship and take counsel with those who have been its 
prophets or the living incarnation of it. This is 
what schools are for and the whole process of edu- 
cation, and not a little of the fault of modern 
education lies in its failure in just these regions. 

For what shall it profit a man to understand the 
higher mathematics and to have been made a master 
of technical processes if, at the same time, he does 
not understand the power of love and faith and 
goodness and has no vision of the true ends to which 
his skill must address itself? But when we do let 
the best have its way with us, dwelling much in the 
comradeship of it, open to its suggestions and 
obedient to its voices, then, by the grace of God, 
we being what we are and the best what it is, it 
will in the end make us its disciples. 

For the best needs time and much living with. 
It does not take us by storm, it wins us slowly by 
the beauty, grace, or wonder of it, displacing lesser 


35 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


things by its majestic self-assertion, establishing its 
sovereignty in our own consent and fashioning us to 
become its ministers or its habitations before it sets 
up its throne room in our souls. I cannot suffi- 
ciently illustrate all this, though there is no end of 
illustration. ‘Take music for example. Our first 
hearing of a great symphony was often a weary 
experience. Its themes and hesitant harmonies, its 
intricate movements and embroidered variations 
were too high and hard for us. 

We did not understand how harmony gathers 
melody into its movements as some great stream 
carries along with it all its tributaries. But in the 
end great music often heard began to have its way 
with us. It created new powers of appreciation, 
new faculties of understanding, set up its own 
standards and ruled by its own laws. Poor music 
and cheap and noisy fell back into its own low place 
and we saw that between a noble rendering of a 
noble symphony and the last popular song there is 
an almost unbridgeable gulf. So we were made free 
of the best, friends and lovers of it rejoicing in the 
greatness of it, answering to the call of it and antici- 
pating in the glory of it that music which the seer 
of the Book of Revelation heard beating like the 
waves of the sea at the foot of the throne of God. 

What is true of training in music is true also of 


36 


The Price of the Best 


training in art and architecture and supremely true 
of growth in character and conduct and fellowship. 
There is always, for every task and every relation- 
ship, a best. Sometimes very simple, as a motor 
car or carrying on a business. Sometimes rare and 
high as the best way of lifting the fretted towers of 
time-worn cathedrals against the sky, or organizing 
the State, or perfecting the soul. But all these 
things, small or great, have something in common, 
some suggestion of excellence, some satisfying ap- 
peal to the eye or the heart or the soul, some inti- 
mation of “a spirit still more deeply interfused” 
which, whether it reveal itself in the weaving of a 
piece of cloth or the fabrication of character, is still 
the same spirit facing us in the same direction and 
revealing to us a supreme power. 

The best is always honest and always useful; 
there is something of love in it and something of 
Service; it is true in proportion; it has its elements 
of beauty; it always looks away from the stained 
and the commonplace; it is always calling us to 
something better still than itself; it at once satisfies 
us and fills us with divine discontent. Step by step 
the best builds for us the ladders by which we climb 
and I care not where you are or what you are doing, 
if you have only the vision of the best in your sta- 
tion and your task it will face you toward God. 

a 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


The first price of the best is the dearly bought and 
richly rewarding power to know it. 


II 


The second price of the best is the capacity to 
labor for it. It is not enough to recognize it, to 
know its tests and its laws, to face toward it and 
to long for it; we must go on to make it real and 
this means sheer, endless, hard work. It is happy 
work, I grant you. There is no happiness in life 
like doing some worthy thing in a fine way. There 
is a workman within us all who sings at his work 
when he loves it and does it well. Then we share 
something of the joy of God and repeat within our 
souls the splendor of that creative morning in which 
willing constellations were set in their places and 
all the stars sang together for joy that they were 
made. But it means weariness, none the less, a 
trying capacity for taking pains and the willingness 
to do over and over again the thing which seemed 
quite well done, but not quite as well done as it 
might be. 

A hurrying, impatient time, more concerned with 
quantity than quality of production, a machine- 
made time and all that goes along with a machine- 
made time, is not kind to good work. Nearly all 


38 


The Price of the Best 


our factories have a speeding-up system in which 
the man who sets the pace possesses a driving 
faculty for rapid mechanical operation; all the rest 
in his line take their tempo from him—or leave the 
line. There is no place in such a system for loving 
excellency of craftsmanship. Cathedrals are not 
built like that, nor did medieval workmen thus forge 
a sword or make a coat of mail or weave a fabric 
shot with splendor. It was not thus that the gold- 
smiths of the Renaissance beat out their work, nor 
the craftsmen of Greece built their Parthenons. 
Perhaps our protests against the mechanics of our 
time are vain and we gain in the range of our ma- 
terial comfort what we lose in creative joy—I do 
not know. But I do know that the best demands 
something more than sweat-stained piecework. 

It demands labor happily done with love and 
vision and care. No one has written such English 
as Ruskin at his best. You may find what fault 
with him and his gospel you will, nevertheless there 
remain of him passages which constitute and will 
always constitute a peculiar treasure of our mother 
tongue. We have, happily, manuscripts of his 
which tell us how he did his work, crossed, re- 
crossed, interwritten, as it were a tangled web, but 
none the less a web woven upon the loom of a master 
mind, out of which there finally emerges a golden, 


39 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


glowing fabric, each new word better than the last, 
each new sentence more nobly rhythmic, each new 
image more luminously suggestive, until at last the 
passage stands before us written as the angels write 
who keep the books of God. But it was all hard 
work, sheer hard work. 

You read Charles Dickens in endless wonder at 
the wealth of his imagination and the elasticity of 
his mind, and yet Dickens’ manuscripts are akin to 
Ruskin’s in their revelation of a consuming toil and 
an almost endless correction. Charles Frederick 
Watts spent all the later years of his life working 
over a figure which was to represent Physical 
Knowledge. Those with whom he lived used to hear 
the old man laboring in the gray dawn, the sound 
of his hammer as it were the echo of the ardor of 
his soul, and, even so, he left the figure unfinished. 
The great scientists have given their lives to their 
discoveries; the great statesmen have been men of 
endless industry; from every region in which excel- 
lence, whether simple or great, has ever been 
achieved, there comes to us a great crowd of wit- 
nesses bearing this common testimony that we may 
purchase the best only at the price of great labor. 


40 


The Price of the Best 


III 


And all this deepens down into something indeed 
akin to what we have been considering, but some- 
thing greater still. The price of the best is the 
willingness to be wholly lost in the achievement of 
it. Labor and sacrifice are both a fire, but labor is 
the constant heat of a slow fire, and sacrifice is 
that fire blown for one splendid and glowing instant 
into flame. It is in those flaming moments that the 
great things are consummated and though they con- 
sume the one who does the work, none the less he 
lives in what he has so greatly done and thereafter 
belongs to the fellowship of the Immortals. This 
is perhaps only another way of saying that the 
greater bests come out of flaming passions and inten- 
sities. The altar of the best asks for a sacrifice the 
whole of us, body, mind, and soul. No wonder we 
fear it. The richer colors of the great canvases are 
mixed with the heart blood of the men who painted 
them; the inspiring strains of the great symphonies 
which lift us so high, carried the men who voiced 
them altogether and often too soon out of our world. 

There is throughout the earlier part of the Old 
Testament a haunting fear of the vision of God and 
a strange persuasion that no one could look upon 
Him and live. So with the best; its lights are blind- 

4] 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


ing, its fires are consuming and those who rise to its 
highest levels pay their price for their seasons of 
vision and their ecstasy of creation. More than 
that, there have always been times in human his- 
tory, as there have always been crises in the human 
soul, when some great cause which has become for 
the time the very incarnation of the best has asked 
of those who would hear and follow, an utter devo- 
tion of all that they are. The saints and the 
mystics have always known this. We purchase our 
commonplace goodness at the commonplace price, 
but they paid for sanctity with self-denial and 
sometimes martyrdom. They poured everything 
into the crucible and though we have drawn there- 
from the pure gold of their spirit, they themselves 
perished in the flames. 

Lovers of the best can never be cautious nor con- 
servative; they must from time to time choose be- 
tween the lesser interests and the supreme interests. 
They must decide between the comfortable accept- 
ance of things as they are and the resolute affirma- 
tion of things as they ought to be. No need to say 
where this leads us. It leads us toward the fellow- 
ship of the saints and prophets, the apostles and the 
martyrs—those who were not disobedient unto the 
heavenly vision and whose obedience, though it cost 
them so greatly, is the secret of their deathless 


42 


The Price of the Best 


power. All this is, I confess, a strong statement of 
situations all of us may not be asked to face, nor 
any of us, save in those rare and shining moments 
when the best asks the last great price, but unless 
there be at the heart of all of our love of the best 
a passion which will make us equal to any challenge 
of it, we shall fail of the best even in happy and 
unheroic times. 


IV 


I would not for a moment underestimate the high 
achievement of our own time, nor the passion for 
the best which holds amongst us. Each age has its 
own excellencies and many forces conspire to create 
for changing lands and times some changing splendor 
of high achievement. Only Egypt could bury its 
kings in such tombs as Tut-ankh-amen’s, only 
Greece lift. the pillared perfectness of the Par- 
thenon against an azure sky, only Rome make a 
golden mile post the center of empire, only Pales- 
tine voice the devotion of humanity in her Psalms. 
But we have our own virtues and our own visions 
and they are not unworthy of our time and its force. 
Perhaps the secret of our discontent is in the range 
and daring of our dreams. High things are low 
enough when you measure them against the skyline 


43 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


of the world. We are discontented with many con- 
ditions which would doubtless seem to other times 
the happy realization of their braver dreams, and 
other times have doubtless shared with us the un- 
willingness to pay the full price of the best. 

But I wonder after all if we may not find in some 
arresting disparity between our dreams and the 
practical conduct of our affairs, the secret of our 
spiritual entanglements. We dream of peace and 
maintain the most massive armaments of time; 
we see 


—beyond the years 
“Our” alabaster cities gleam 
Undimmed by human tears. 


And yet we darken our skies with smoke till noth- 
ing gleams undarkened, and create new occasions 
for tears in the death toll of our hard-driven motor 
cars. We pray for the Kingdom of God and build 
amongst us, still more deeply established in almost 
every aspect of our human enterprise, the structure 
of an order alien to the Master’s vision, and all be- 
cause we will not pay the price of our dreams. We 
can have the better things, not quickly or easily, 
but always at their price. God is a just paymaster. 
We have just as much of the best as we deserve, 
often a little more, never less. 


44 


The Price of the Best 


The price of alabaster cities is white-souled men 
and women and clean-handed, high-minded officials 
and civic cooperation and an intelligent understand- 
ing of civic problems and eternal vigilance and fore- 
sighted programs and creative patience and the 
subordination of lesser interests to the common 
good. 

The price of a noble state is a noble citizenship, 
for whom the state is a revelation of spiritual and 
ethical values, secured by obedience to law and wise 
administration and flawless justice and a supreme 
concern for human and humane conditions in every 
relationship. 

The price of a warless world is a passion for peace 
and honorable diplomacies and the cooperative crea- 
tion of an international machinery which will sub- 
stitute its own decisions and adjustments for the 
arbitrament of war, and a braver confidence in good 
will and the care to do no despite to others, and the 
understanding of the full humanity of folk whose 
flag is not our flag, whose speech is not our speech— 
whose skins are not our color. The price of a war- 
less world is new definitions of honor and patriotism, 
a deepening hatred of hate, a clearer vision of the 
grim realities behind the seductive pageantry of 
armies and navies, a new understanding of the fal- 
lacy of force, a radiant confidence in the Gospel of 


45 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


Jesus Christ. The price of a soul is unfailing well- 
doing, and the mastery of low inheritance, and love 
and labor and faith undimmed, and hidden fellow- 
ship with unseen and enduring things. 

And the price of the Kingdom of God? Just what 
Jesus said—all that a man has. Christianity has 
always asked everything a man has. It asked of 
the handful of Jews who first followed Jesus the 
willingness to be separated from their people and 
forego their pride. It asked of Greeks and Romans 
who made the cross their sign, the willingness, at a 
cost which we shall never understand, to disentangle 
themselves from a pagan life which met and seduced 
them at every step they made. It asked of our 
fathers’ fathers in northern forests, new reverences, 
new obediences, new goodnesses. 

To-day the Kingdom of God is asking us to apply 
its principles to the conduct of our common life, to 
make its spirit regnant in politics and in business, to 
test our convictions and our inheritances by its tests 
and to subdue every region of our lives to its im- 
perial concern. 


V 


Aye, the best has its price, but the best is worth 
its price. We can at any rate do no more—nor less 


46 


The Price of the Best 


—than spend ourselves; life is just a matter of ex- 
change. Here is a lesson from the Parable of the 
Talents not often considered. God does not ask us 
to put the treasure of life to the exchanges for His 
profit, but for ours. The buried life is lost. We 
have no choice but to trade, our only choice is the 
market to which we go. We spend the pregnant 
force of us, body, mind, and soul; we spend our days 
and our years; we spend our laughter and our tears, 
our love, our labor, and our rest; the inexorable 
laws of life demand them all and when we have 
spent the substance for the shadow, how piteously 
poor we are. A man takes away a poor profit when 
he trades at the stalls of Vanity Fair, though he 
buy himself honors, preferments, titles, countries, 
kingdoms, lusts, or pleasures. 

There is a nobler exchange than that. We may 
buy knowledge with study, and strength with labor, 
and tenderness with tears, and high happiness with 
laughter. We may bring away courage from the 
field of battle and goodness from much wrestling 
with evil things. The passing years leave behind 
them a deposit of rich experience. Love gains 
added love, and loyalties are paid for in a splendor 
of holy causes greatly served and a wealth of soul 
whose glory, like the glory of pictured windows only 
dimly guessed from without, is their enduring 


47 


Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


treasure who conduct the commerce of their lives 
with the best. How superbly are they profited who, 
having spent all, have gained their own souls and in 
the gaining of them touched with a rarer glory the 
fellowships of which they are a part and brought a 
little nearer the Master’s purpose and the prophet’s 
dream. 





Dr. Roberts is a Welshman, a preacher both by nature and 
by grace, a mystic in his faith and a keen analytical realist in 
his thought; a teacher suffused with the glow of vision—no 
blinding flame, no flashing lightning—and a quiet, penetrating 
spiritual intelligence; ‘as if he had wrestled with the questions 
which fever men, but waited till the fevers were past. Edu- 
cated in his native land, he came from a notable pastorate in 
Crouch End, London, to the Church of the Pilgrims in Brook- 
lyn, and thence to his throne of power in the American Church 
of Montreal—one of the most strategic and influential pulpits 
in our Western World. His books best known in America are 
That One Face, a study of Jesus in the minds of poets and 
prophets, and his searching critique of modern life in the light 
of the mind of Jesus, in The Untried Door. But some of us 
like best The Papers of John Pererin, published anonymously, 
if only because that wise man knew, with Patmore, that “in 
divinity and love what’s best worth saying can’t be said.” 
The value of this sermon, apart from its devastating analysis 
of the dogma of automatic evolution, lies in its emphasis upon 
the need of effort, discipline, method in the culture of the inner 
life, lest faith fade from our hearts in the rush of activity and 
the cumber of neglect. Oddly enough, we who insist upon sys- 
tem in everything try to live the spiritual life haphazard, and 
it is a wonder that we have any faith at all, since we take so 
little time and pains to keep it alive and aglow in our hearts. 


THE SURVIVAL OF FAITH 


RICHARD ROBERTS, D.D. 
THE AMERICAN CHURCH, MONTREAL 


“When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the 
earth?” Luke 18: 8. 


I 


I imagine that most of us have stood and pon- 
dered over this verse. Was it a passing mood of 
pessimism? Was it a momentary failure of nerve? 
Or was it perhaps pure weariness of mind and body, 
the sort of condition in which we all sink into doubt 
and misgiving about the future? Or was it the de- 
liberate expression of an abiding and reasoned con- 
viction? At first sight it seems somewhat strange 
that Jesus, whose faith in God was so sure and serene, 
should have had any doubts. But, plainly, it is one 
thing to have faith in God and quite another to have 
faith in man. And explain this how you will, it does 
reflect a skepticism about human nature. 

Obviously, Jesus did not believe in Progress—in 
the inevitability of human perfection. This passage 
itself is enough to prove that Jesus did not think 


51 


Richard Roberts, D.D. 


that the world would necessarily grow better and 
finer. And the sooner we rid ourselves of the nine- 
teenth-century myth of Progress, the better for us - 
and for the world. ‘Always toward perfection is the 
mighty movement,” cried Herbert Spencer in a 
dithyrambic moment; and because the prediction was 
made in the name of Science, we swallowed it whole, 
not knowing that science no less than Religion could 
have its superstitions. The doctrine of evolution was 
extended into the theory that there was an irresisti- 
ble force behind us driving us onward to some in- 
definable splendor of perfection; and the entirely 
sound doctrine of human perfectibility was trans- 
figured into the wholly false doctrine of the certainty 
of human perfection. 

And in those days there were some sanctions for 
the illusion. Great strides were actually being made 
in knowledge and invention; it did seem as though 
the growth of modern science with its continuous 
conquest of the world of nature indicated a forward 
movement of so great promise as to persuade us that 
its momentum was inexhaustible. But we were over- 
credulous; we lacked realism of insight; for while 
all this alleged progress was going on before our eyes, 
we were so dazzled by it that we forgot to take ac- 
count of things that were going on out of sight. And 
it took the terrible apocalypse of War to show us 

Din 


The Survival of Faith 


that all this time we were living in a fool’s paradise. 
For with all its external progress, the world was 
growing rotten at heart; with all its mechanical and 
physical triumphs, it was in a condition of spiritual 
and moral decadence. Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, 
speaking of the present state of the world, says in a 
recently published book: ‘‘This is not a collapse of 
the European Faith caused by the war; it is collapse 
revealed by the war.” For us of this generation, to 
whom the confusion and sorrow of nearly ten years 
have shown beyond forgetting the perverseness and 
stupidity of human nature and who will carry the 
scars of its wounds upon our souls to the grave, it 
should not be difficult to enter into the thought of 
Jesus when he asked his ominous question—‘‘When 
the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith upon the 
earth?” 


II 


With the word Progress went another which we 
did not sufficiently examine—the word Civilization. 
There is, to be sure, nothing wrong with the word; 
the mischief is in the sort of content we have given 
to it. A recent writer draws a distinction between 
civilization and culture. Culture, he says, “‘is the 
complex of all the inner and spiritual values of man- 


53 


Richard Roberts, D.D. 


kind (religion, art, philosophy) ,”’ and Civilization is 
“the sum of all the external values (industry, tech- 
nics, trade, politics, etc.).” He goes on to point out 
that culture and civilization do not necessarily go to- 
gether, and gives instances of races which have had 
a high culture with a meager civilization, and of 
others who have had a great civilization with a rela- 
tively low culture. And his conclusion is that ‘“‘the 
hidden drama of history is an everlasting struggle 
between the external and the inner values of man- 
kind, a struggle between matter and spirit, between 
culture and civilization.” In this struggle, the odds 
are in favor of the outer as against the inner, in 
favor of civilization as against culture. 

This, I think, is only a modern way of saying what 
was in the mind of Jesus; and it is borne out by 
what students of the history of civilization tell us. 
Newman, you will remember, held that a civilization 
began in an age of faith, thence passed into an age 
of analysis and skepticism, and finally reached an 
age of materialism. ‘The force of the inner cultural 
impulse is worn down by the attrition of reason and 
sense. Faith is hard put to it to survive. And that 
is not difficult to explain. We are creatures of sense 
living in a world of things. The objects of faith 
are remote, impalpable,“tnd imponderable, while the 
objects of sense are immediate and easily got at. 


54 


aS 


The Survival of Faith 


Faith implies a continuous effort of thought and will 
to transcend the immediate; and there is in mankind 
a natural inertia which resists this effort and takes 
easily and comfortably to the line of least resistance. 
So little by little the impulse of faith loses its mo- 
mentum and we drift to the flesh pots. 

Now this was the very danger that Jesus had in 
his mind in the parable of the Importunate Widow, 
to which this question is a postscript. If the stub- 
bornness of that judge with the hard face and the 
hard heart could be broken down by the pertinacity 
of a poor widow, do you think that God will not 
vindicate his own faithful children? You can, he 
insists, count upon God to justify those who put their 
trust in him, to vindicate those who live in the spirit 
and wait for his kingdom. If human nature at its 
worst (and the picture of the impious and inhuman 
judge is meant to suggest that) can be prevailed upon 
to redress a grievance by the sheer importunity of an 
injured and friendless widow, then it stands to reason 


that God will not allow those who look to him to be 


confounded. 

There is a word in the parable from which the text 
is taken which seems to involve an inconsistency, “‘I 
tell you he will avenge them speedily.” Speedily, 
you will observe. Now, in the parable the point is 
plainly that the dilatoriness of the judge is overcome 


55 


Richard Roberts, D.D. 


by the perseverance of the widow, and that is in- 
tended to hint at the fact that God also takes his 
time about vindicating the faith of the elect. That 
is indeed one of the commonplaces of the religious 
experience; God does not always come to the rescue 
of his own speedily. He seems to take his time about 
it; and that is why the effort of faith becomes so 
heavy to maintain. That was the ground of the 
Jewish pessimism in Babylon; it is the central point 
of the Book of Job. And all through the ages, per- 
sons and peoples in long continued distress have 
echoed and reéchoed the Psalmist’s cry, How long? 
O Lord, how long? So that it is not true to experi- 
ence to say that God is sure to vindicate his elect 
speedily. Either the word has crept in by some 
inadvertence; or we are to take it as signifying that 
though the vindication may be delayed, yet when it 
does come it will be swift and summary. And the 
problem of the elect is how they are to hold out until 
the vindication comes. 


Tit 


But before I come to that, I want to say a word 
about the realism of Jesus. He had no illusions about 
human nature. He knew what was in man and 
needed that no man should tell him. He told men 


56 


The Survival of Faith 


that there was a good time coming; the Kingdom of 
heaven, he said, is at hand. But it was with none 
of that shallow optimism which sings that “there’s 
a good time coming,’ anyhow, and bids us “wait 
until the clouds roll by.” The clouds that overhang 
human life will not roll by unless we start them roll- 
ing; and the Kingdom of heaven comes only to those 
who repent. You can take God’s friendliness, his 
willingness and readiness for granted; you can count 
upon that with the most complete confidence. But 
what Jesus evidently could not count upon was hu- 
man nature. Not indeed that he ever went to the 
other extreme of stupid sentimental pessimism which 
regards human nature as essentially bad and that — 
you cannot change it. Human nature can change; 
it is changing ail the time; and if it is not changing 
for the better, it is changing for the worse. Of noth- 
ing in the world can you say with more assurance 
that it changes than you can say it of human nature. 
And it is either improving or deteriorating; the one 
thing it cannot do is to remain static. But it is not 
at all sure that the final change in mankind will be 
for the better. It can be and it may be; but whether 
it will, no one can tell. And Jesus did not try to 
tell. He came to redeem mankind; but would man- 
kind allow itself to be redeemed? He came to bring 
in the Kingdom of God; but would mankind admit 
57 


Richard Roberts, D.D. 


the Kingdom into their hearts? And to that ques- 
tion he offered no answer. He believed in the per- 
fectibility of man; but he did not, for he could not 
affirm the certainty of human perfection. This is a 
region in which you cannot count on evolution or 
progress; for man is the arbiter of his own fate. 
God made him free and put the choice in his own 
hands. Here there is neither certainty nor inevita- 
bility; and Jesus did not suffer himself to be de- 
ceived. He said that there was a doubt; but he also 
believed that there was a hope. And that is the 
only position which a man who faces all the facts of 
life can take up. And to-day as we see how little 
men have assimilated the wisdom that the War made 
plain as daylight and how the peoples are still build- 
ing the house of life on the old rotten foundations, 
are we unreasonable if we believe with Jesus that the 
destiny of mankind is still in doubt? 


IV 


In the end, however, we shall have to answer for 
ourselves, not for mankind. It is indeed true that the 
circle of our responsibility has a wider radius than 
we suppose; we are our brothers’ keepers to a much 
greater extent than we commonly recognize. But 
even then, our central and critical responsibility lies 


58 


The Survival of Faith 


in what we do with ourselves, whether we keep faith 
with the Son of man; and the answer is within our 
own choice. We can keep the faith if we will. But 
all the same it is not an easy matter. For faith 
has to make an endless fight for its life against sense 
and reason. It has to maintain itself in the face of 
the confusion and sorrow and distress of life. And 
if it is left to shift for itself, the pressure of the 
immediate and outward facts of life will soon or late 
surely put it out of business. Faith can only survive 
by continual reaffirmation; if we are to save it alive, 
we shall have to go out of our way, to take time and 
trouble to declare ourselves for it. We dare not let 
it go unwatched and untended. Sense and reason 
will crowd it out if they can; and when that threatens 
to happen, and sense and reason are outstepping their 
province, then we must needs affirm our faith in their 
teeth—but always taking care that faith for its own 
sake neither denies nor flouts them nor drives them 
out of their legitimate places. The facts of life may 
sometimes threaten to overwhelm our faith; and then 
faith must nail its colors to the mast in the face of 
them. And not only in such emergencies as these, 
when faith is hard beset, but at all times must we 
take pains to affirm our faith. For even deadlier than 
the crises and the contradictions of life is the slow 
imperceptible attrition of the daily round. Jack 
59 


Richard Roberts, D.D. 


London in one of his stories tells of some people 
in the Arctic Circle who could not see the sun be- 
cause of the bulge of the earth; and against the bulge 
of the world which is always too much with us, we 
must continually constrain faith to bear its testimony 
to the unseen Sun of our souls. 

So we must provide for it in the plan of our lives. 
The reinforcement and nurture of faith cannot be 
left to odd moments and to our loose ends of time. 
In the sort of life we moderns live, faith will be 
surely crowded out if we do not make for it a place 
and keep that place inviolate. The idea of the “re- 
treat” springs out of a perfectly sound understanding 
of the psychology of the inner life; the soul must 
have its retreats if faith is to live. You remember 
the seed that fell among thorns; it sprouted; but in 
that hedgerow there was a struggle for existence and 
the sensitive slender shoot had no chance. And that 
is a parable of the crowded life we lead. The word 
of God is sown in us; and it sprouts in a frail and 
tender plant of faith. And tough shrubs of secular 
interest crowd in upon it and choke it so that it 
withers and dies. So some ground must be cleared 
and reserved for it. Faith is always under sentence 
of death in the soul which has no trysting place with 
the Unseen. 

And this trysting place must be sacred and invio- 

60 | 


The Survival of Faith 


late; the soul’s private demesne that is not to be 
invaded or appropriated by any other concern what- 
soever—an hour, or half an hour or even a quarter, 
staked out In some part of the day and kept re- 
ligiously to its purpose, when the soul can gather 
itself together and return to the base of its life; 
and that become as strong a habit as your lunch 
hour—that is what I mean by clearing the ground 
for faith. And remember that perseverance, stead- 
fastness, is of the very essence of the matter. We 
must regard it for what it is—grave momentous 
business not to be lightly intruded upon; and we 
must not suppose any secular call to be of so great 
_ urgency as to entitle us to neglect it. More, I think, 
depends—not alone for ourselves, but for the world 
—than we can think on our acquiring this habit of 
the daily retreat of the soul; for our own quickened 
faith-will be a contagious thing, quickening the faith 
of others. I do not forget that our Sunday Worship 
is also a retreat of the soul; and we come to the 
Sacrament as to a trysting place with the Unseen; 
and all this should go to the renewal of faith “until 
He come.” But beneath and before all our common 
trysting places, we must first of all recreate the soul’s 
own sanctuary, its own daily resort into the secret 
place of the Most High... . 

But, having arrived there, what will it do? There 

61 


Richard Roberts, D.D. 


is indeed plenty to do, as we shall find when we be- 
come familiar with the ground. But chiefly this, 
I imagine; we shall recollect—gather together in our 
thought—those grounds of faith that the day’s work 
may overlay and drive out of our remembrance. We 
shall think of Jesus—that one clear unsetting star 
above the confusion of life; we shall think of the 
Cross, of its judgment upon our worldly standards 
and our secular blindness; and its unveiling of the 
divine compassion upon our human failures. We 
shall think of saints and prophets who esteemed the 
reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures 
of Egypt. We shall think of the great travail of God 
in creation and in the evolution of life, and of the 
splendor of that purpose for which he created the 
soul of man, that purpose which is obstructed by the 
perversity of man. We shall lift up our eyes on high 
and dwell in thought upon the vast spaces of a divine 
providence that sustains this scheme of things, silent 
and unsleeping. We shall turn the pages of Holy 
Writ and find here and there a word that opens a 
window upon immeasurable reaches of life—stretch- 
ing out far beyond the horizons of sight and sense. 
And out of its recollection the soul will stand up and 
declareats faith) 


“TI believe in the love of God through Jesus Christ. 
62 | 


The Survival of Faith 


“T believe in the Cross of Calvary as the ground 
plan of the Universe. 

-“T believe in the transcendental meaning and hope 
of Life. 

“T believe that the true goods of life lie in the 
unseen, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of 
God, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt nor 
thieves break through and steal. 

“T believe that the real values of life are the good, 
the true, and the beautiful. 

“T believe in the salvability and the immortality 
of every man; and in the infinite value of every living 
soul. 

“T believe in the practicability of the Kingdom 
of God, and in my freedom to choose it and to work 
for it. 

“T believe in the sacramental quality of my day’s 
work,:and that I may see and serve God in it. 

“T believe in a grace that can overcome my selfish- 
ness and my pride, that will enable me to overcome 
temptation, and upon which I need never call in vain. 

“T believe in love as the final law of life. 

“And in this faith, by the help of God, I mean to 
live this day and all my days.” 


And, men and women, believe me, it is altogether 
impossible for you or for me to measure what differ- 


63 


Richard Roberts, D.D. 


ence such a daily act of faith may make to our days, 
and to those with whom we have to do. And best of 
all is this, that whether the master of the house 
comes at even or at midnight or at cockcrow or in 
the morning, he shall find us unsleeping, with the 
banner of our faith.flying bravely in the breeze. And 
whether we shall be of this company of unsurren- 
dered faith or not, it is for us ourselves to say. 


THE SALT OF THE EARTH 


Dr. Sockman is an outstanding example of the New Preach- 
ing in which the old verities of faith are united with a realistic 
vision of the complexities of modern life, with its problems, 
obligations and opportunities for larger service. An Ohioan by 
birth, trained in Ohio Wesleyan College, in Columbia Uni- 
versity, and Union Theological Seminary, since 1917 he has 
been minister of the Madison Avenue Methodist Church of 
New York City. His first volume of sermons, Suburbs of 
Christianity, recently published—an appeal to those who live 
on the outer edges of the City of God to come into the City 
itself, where the real business of faith is done—attracted wide 
attention, as much for its method as for its message. Simple, 
direct, rich in sympathy and radiant in faith, with no filigree 
oratory, it is intimate in its insight, practical in its approach, 
and searching in its word of comfort and command. The fol- 
lowing sermon is typical of a ministry which gives great 
promise of wise and constructive leadership in a confused and 
difficult time. 


THE SALT OF THE EARTH 


RALPH W. SOCKMAN, D.D. 
MADISON AVENUE METHODIST CHURCH, NEW YORK 


“Ve are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost its 
savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for 
nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men.” 

Matt?) 5:12: 


Jesus recognized man’s desire to distinguish him- 
self. The normal person does not wish to be lost 
in the crowd. On the ladders not only of ambition 
but of self-respect men climb up to write their names 
on the walls of society above the reach of the eras- 
ing masses. It is not good for a man to lose the 
sense of his personal distinction under the dwarfing 
pressure of numbers. 

In The Boy and the Angel Browning pictures an 
archangel coming down to sing God’s praise in the 
place of a little boy. The poet interprets God as 
saying, ‘I miss my little human praise.”’ Not even 
the great organ notes of the archangel could replace 
in the ear of God the tiny treble of the little lad. In 
God’s hearing every human voice has its distinctive 
tone. A man must recognize this truth if he is to 


67 


Ralph W. Sockman, D.D. 


do his best work. He must feel that he is making 
a unique contribution to society. He must sense 
his individual worth. 

Jesus, therefore, the master developer of individ- 
uality, appealed to this human trait. He went to 
the plain man on the street, so buried in mediocrity 
that he was overlooked by the temple officials and 
the governmental authorities. Jesus bade him con- 
sider the sparrow. the commonest of birds, the little 
drab brown creature seemingly so lacking in distinc- 
tiveness. ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? and 
not one of them shall fall on the ground without 
your Father; but the very hairs of your head are 
all numbered. Fear not, therefore: ye are of more 
value than many sparrows.” Hearing that, the little 
fellow in the crowd straightened up with a new sense 
of self-respect. He felt himself to be a worth-while 
actor on the stage of life, for he was under the spot- 
light of at least God’s gaze. 

This service rendered by Jesus to the common man 
in Jerusalem is more imperatively needed for the 
man in the crowd to-day. As human beings become 
more compressed in society, the individual must 
struggle the harder to keep from being submerged 
in the mass. The crowded city tends to smother 
individuality. The virtues of the man on Broadway 
are allowed to blush unseen by appreciative neigh- 


68 


The Salt of the Earth 


bors. His vices can go unblushing because unnoticed 
by neighborhood censors. The city dweller lacks the 
support of local reputation to carry him across his 
moods of waywardness and irresponsibility. It 
would be hard to estimate how the moral and civic 
tone of our city communities would be elevated if 
the residents of a metropolis felt the same sense of 
personal worth and responsibility as do the dwellers 
in the diminutive county seat. Cultivating hardy 
characters is difficult on paved streets amid trampling 
throngs. 

Modern industry, as well as modern cities, tends 
to make the individual shrivel. More and more men 
are coming to work in great groups where they are 
known by number rather than by name. In modern 
politics, too, the man is becoming increasingly a 
mere cog ina machine. The citizen of to-day dwells 
in city ant-hills, works in factory armies, votes in 
mammoth parties. What can protect the individual 
from the crowd? What can preserve the uniqueness 
of the one from the mediocrity of the many? 

Our answer is “Religion.”” We shall be more de- 
finitive and say, “The religion of Jesus Christ.” 
The Christian gospel is a gospel of persons, not of 
percentages. It is the good news of a shepherding 
Savior who was not content with ninety-nine percent 
safe, but went out to find the lost one, even though 

69 


Ralph W. Sockman, D.D. 


the lone wanderer be the most insignificant unit of 
America’s one hundred millions or of China’s four 
hundred millions. Its results are eloquent. Individ- 
ual life has been held of more value on the shores 
of Massachusetts Bay than on the banks of the 
Ganges. That Christianity which has inflated souls 
with the spirit of true self-respect is needed more 
than ever in the crowd pressure of to-day. 

“Ve are the salt of the earth,” said Jesus; “but if 
the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be 
salted?” The followers of Christ must not lose them- 
selves in the crowd. They must retain their distinc- 
tive flavor of character and work or be ignored. The 
Church of Christ is to permeate the world with its 
influence, but it must not lose its uniqueness. True 
Christians are the preserving and reasoning element 
in society, but if they lose their peculiar savor they 
will forfeit the respect of men and the power of 
Service. 

That is the point of the Master’s message in our 
text. That is the burden of the whole fifth chapter 
of Matthew. In that chapter Matthew has collected 
certain sayings of Jesus which describe distinctive 
qualities expected of his followers. They may be 
roughly grouped for convenience under three general 
heads. First, a Christian’s personal righteousness 
must “exceed the righteousness” of the crowd. It 


70 


The Salt of the Earth 


is his extra margin of goodness that makes for the 
Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus states some of the stand- 
ardized virtues and vices. “Thou shalt not kill.” 
“Thou shalt not commit adultery.”” Mere conven- 
tional goodness, however, does not make Christians 
the ‘“‘salt of the earth.” 

A college professor was asked recently to name 
the most subtle and potent evil visible on the horizon 
of his world. He replied, ‘Crowd morality.” It is 
a sad sight to watch a lad’s lofty peaks of individual 
virtue leveled down to the mediocrity of the crowd’s 
standards. The college campus often witnesses such 
moral weathering. It is pathetic to see a young 
fellow come to a great city from the purity of a 
godly home with one of those kodak consciences 
which can take a snapshot of a moral wrong, and 
then in the foggy atmosphere of some business circles 
become so dull of vision that he can take a time 
exposure of a flagrant evil and register only a dull 
impression. Crowd morality is one of the greatest 
hindrances of Kingdom progress to-day. “Every- 
body does it” is a most insidious slogan. 

Distinctive goodness is dynamic. A very nice con- 
trast between the merely legalistic virtue that “gets 
by” in the crowd and the kind of goodness that is 
dynamic was drawn by The Gentleman with the 
Duster in The Glass of Fashion. The wives of two 

71 


Ralph W. Sockman, D.D. 


former British premiers were held up for comparison. 
One took delight in telling how she flirted with temp- 
tations which could never have gotten into the vesti- 
bule of the other woman’s mind. The same one 
relates with evident relish how near she could walk 
to the edge of a moral precipice without falling over. 
The other, equally vivacious, equally in love with 
life and society, possessed down underneath her flash- 
ing exterior a steadying earnestness of purpose that 
kept her from all vulgarities. This latter type of 
virtue helps to quicken the good impulses of others. 
Our society has little need for the man of merely 
legalistic goodness. We have enough of the moral 
rope-walkers who can tread the taut line of the Ten 
Commandments without falling off. What we need 
are the men of surplus virtue who, after they have 
fought their own temptations, have the energy and 
desire to help in the struggle of their weaker fellows. 
We need character giants who can carry their vir- 
tues with an easy grace that makes goodness seem 
attractive and attainable to others. We need men of 
such abounding moral health that they are immune 
from sinful infection. It is good to have public 
officials who will promise to enforce such laws as 
prohibition, in which they profess not to believe; but 
we shall have no great measure of success in the 
enforcement of such laws until we have officials with — 


72 


The Salt of the Earth 


sufficient social consciousness to desire legislation of 
this type. 

Crowd morality is not dynamic. It is deadly, un- 
interesting. The romance and flavor of virtue are 
found in the righteousness which ‘‘exceeds the right- 
eousness of the scribes and Pharisees.” H. G. Wells 
has given us a virile figure when he pictures Jesus 
of Nazareth as a great moral huntsman sweeping 
across the world, digging men out of the little burrows 
of respectability in which they have ensconced them- 
selves. What a noble description of Jesus! How 
he does call men out from their little standardized 
conceptions of morality! How he summons us to 
come out beyond the crowd’s standards and enjoy 
the adventure of the “second mile” and “the other 
cheek.” 

The Church of Christ must either outrun the crowd 
in the matter of personal righteousness or be outrun 
by the crowd and trampled under the foot of men. 
“Ye are the. salt of the earth,” said Jesus; “but if 
the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be 
salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing but to 
be cast out and trodden under foot of men.” 

A second distinctive quality expected of Christians, 
according to this fifth chapter of Matthew, is speech. 
The passage beginning, “Thou shalt not forswear 
thyself,” has been used to introduce many a sermon 

73 


Ralph W. Sockman, D.D. 


on profanity. Profanity of speech, however, is not 
limited to the vice commonly called “swearing.” 
The vulgar use of the names of deity is a crudity 
that, in my opinion, is being outgrown. It is a reve- 
lation of ascanty vocabulary. It isa filthy habit that 
will be removed bythe antiseptic of culture. 

But Jesus was not referring to that type of pro- 
fanity merely. He was decrying the popular dilution 
of current speech with polite insincerities. The 
scribes and Pharisees had so thinned their language 
with hypocrisies that they had to thicken it with 
expletives and oaths to give it any substance of 
truthfulness. That kind of profanity, I submit, is 
not being outgrown by cultured society. 

The language of business has been corrupted. A 
homely illustration suffices. Three cartons of eggs 
stand in a store window. One is labeled ‘“‘Fresh’”; a 
second, “Strictly Fresh’; a third, ‘Guaranteed 
Strictly Fresh.”” We have multiplied our adjectives 
and adverbs and, like the German marks, the more 
they are multiplied the cheaper they become. The 
language of diplomacy has become synonymous with 
polite insincerity. When twenty-five years ago John 
Hay spoke out in straightforward terms, his methods 
were derisively characterized as ‘‘shirt-sleeve diplo- 
macy.” The language of the church has been diluted 
to the point of profanity. A discriminating layman 


74 


The Salt of the Earth 


has said recently that a revival of religion could be 
started in America within a week’s time if every min- 
ister were to express his religious experiences with 
the same simple directness that he uses in discussing 
every-day matters among his friends. Who can deny 
his assertion? Were not rugged realism and unvar- 
nished simplicity of speech the chief traits of that 
remarkably dynamic young English preacher, Stud- 
dert Kennedy, who a few months ago blessed 
American audiences with a visit? Are we not to find 
in sincerity and frankness of language one of the 
best paths out of the morass of present theological 
entanglements? 

We speak of getting back to apostolic Christianity. 
Yes, let us return. But let us not go back to the 
verbose phrase-making theologians of the seventeenth 
century and call their output apostolic Christianity. 
Let us not go back to the abstract definitions of 
creed-making monks of the fourth century and call 
that apostolic Christianity. Let us return to the 
simple, direct description of religious experience 
given by the Master and those who caught the spirit 
of his message by first-hand contact. Those early 
followers told what they knew of Jesus in the lan- 
guage of everyday life. The freshness of their 
story, the directness of their testimony, were con- 
tagious. They spread through Mediterranean so- 

75 


Ralph W. Sockman, D.D. 


ciety. A revival of religion was quickly on. Might 
not a truly apostolic quickening come to Christianity 
to-day if we were to reform and rephrase our speech? 

“What do ye more than others” in the way of 
Christ-like realism in speaking? Language is such 
a truly God-given medium for spirit intercourse. It 
so often becomes such a man-made non-conductor of 
truth. Speech is a vital element in that distinctive 
flavor and preservative power of Christians which 
make them “the salt of the earth.” 

A third unique quality expected by Christ of his 
followers is a superior sense of justice. ‘‘An eye 
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” is the crowd’s 
idea of getting even. The Christian must be above 
that conception. 

The traditional figure of Justice as given in art is 
of a blindfolded woman with a scales in her hand. 
The essence of justice is thus implied to be the im- 
partial weighing of the evidences in hand. Would 
the portrayal not become more accurately Christian 
if the blindfold were removed? It is not enough 
merely to weigh the facts submitted. To be just 
one must have insight and imagination to see behind 
the evidence presented. Hence our courts of justice 
are coming to have their social investigators, their 
psycopathic experts. Christian justice, in our private 


76 


The Salt of the Earth 


judgments as well as in our public courts, demands 
that the eyes of our understanding be wide open. 

The spirit of justice was expressed with limpid 
clarity in the Golden Rule. But the application of 
that Rule in modern complex society is not so sim- 
ple. If I am to do unto another as I would that 
he should do unto me, I must know what I should 
want done unto me were [ standing in the other 
person’s place. To put oneself at the other’s point 
of view is the task for the Christianized imagination. 
Our modern world is being riven with increasing 
chasms of tragic difference across which it is so 
hard to see sympathetically. For instance, within 
the compass of a quarter-mile in our City of New 
York are to be found apartments with rentals from 
three thousand to thirty thousand dollars a year, 
and also tenements with occupants crowded four to 
aroom. Those in the former may wish to be just 
to those in the latter, but will they give the thought 
and time sufficient to understand what justice really 
involves? 

If I am to be a just member of economic society I 
must know something of How life looks to the em- 
ployer who carries the responsibilities of a great 
enterprise and also how it looks to the sweated son 
of toil who stands day after day pulling a lever or 

77 


Ralph W. Sockman, D.D. 


blowing a forge. If I am to be a just citizen of 
America I must be able to understand the sensitivi- 
ties of a Japanese gentleman and the fears of a 
French ex-refugee. If I am to exercise my duties 
justly as a member.of the white race I must have 
insight enough to appreciate the race consciousness 
of the man whose skin happens to be black or yellow. 

The crowd’s idea of justice is fair play between 
the members of the same class. A sense of honor 
restrains a gentleman in dealing with gentlemen. 
Good fellowship forbids taking unfair advantage of 
one’s social comrades. The world, however, will not 
be redeemed by the club spirit, but by the Christ 
spirit. The Golden Rule can not be drawn to the 
scale of any particular class or notion or race. It is 
that extra margin of justice beyond the crowd’s 
standards which will help to hasten the Kingdom of 
Heaven. It is in going ‘“‘the second mile” that we 
discover the good points of the surly fellow who 
compelled us to carry his load the first mile. It is 
in “turning the other cheek” that we feel the adven- 
ture of redemption. 

The logic of yesterday’s course may be projected 
into a prediction for to-morrow. The Church of 
Christ must either be distinctive or be damned by 
disrespect. Our generation will see one of two trends 
in the Christian enterprise. The church will. live 


78 


The Salt of the Earth 


more and more at the world’s level until ascetic and 
monastic groups will separate themselves from it 
in increasing numbers; or the church in a widespread 
movement will recover the distinctive flavor of holi- 
ness that its Master expected of it as “the salt of 
the earth.” May God grant us the wisdom and 
courage to take the latter, which is the Christlike 
course. 


79 


v 
ay 
1 i 





Wilh 
dS Ne ras 





In these agitated days to be a heretic is to be a hero, 
and such a fortune—or fate—has befallen Dr. Fosdick, mak- 
ing him the center of a theological thunder-storm, much to 
his own regret. Happily, it was a tempest in a tea-pot, since 
the rumpus ended by inviting the “heretic” to enter the fold 
in full fellowship. With these things I have not to do, having. 
little interest and no concern, but it is a pity to have so ex- 
traordinary a ministry marred, or at least interrupted, by 
such a debate. Dr. Fosdick was born in Buffalo forty-six years 
ago, graduated from Colgate University, Union Seminary, and 
Columbia University, and after nine happy years in the First 
Baptist Church of Montclair became first an instructor in 
homiletics and then professor of Practical Theology in Union 
Seminary; and special preacher at the First Presbyterian 
Church of New York. His little books for group study, The 
Meaning of Prayer, The Meaning of Faith, and the rest, have 
had a vast reading in more than one language, while his Cole 
lectures, Christianity and Progress, and his essay on The As- 
surance of Immortality, have helped many a troubled mind. 
The sermon here given shows a brilliant, driving intellect—I 
had almost used the word “clever,” but that would not be 
exact—dealing with Belief in Christ, not Faith; and it reveals 
the qualities which make him so captivating a preacher to 
young people—his radiance of personality, his dash and verve 
of thought, his facility of phrase, his aptness of illustration, 
his uncanny skill in making an abstruse matter as lucid as 
light. If one misses the deep, brooding, wooing note, mayhap 
it will be heard later when time and sorrow make the intel- 
lectual difficulties of belief seem like summer manceuvers along- 
side the tragic warfare of faith with fact. 


BELIEF IN CHRIST 


HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D.D. 
FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEW YORK 


“Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of 
eternal life. And we have believed and know that thou art 
the Holy One of God.” John 6: 68, 69. 


We raised the question last week as to whether 
it matters that a man believe in God or not. To-day 
we press a further question: what difference does it 
make whether or not a man believe in Christ, regard 
Him as indispensable, and set Him at the center of his 
thought of God and his interpretation of life? Long 
ago, as the Fourth Gospel tells us in the sixth chap- 
ter, the first disciples faced that question. The 
crowds that had followed Jesus, disturbed by the 
loftinessfand severity of His demands, were dispers- 
ing. ‘‘Would ye also go away?” said the Master to 
the twelve, and Simon Peter gave the answer that 
has been characteristic of Christianity at its best 
ever since: ‘‘Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast 
the words of eternal life. And we have believed 
and know that thou art the Holy One of God.” 

83 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


Does that attitude make any difference? Is Christ 
indispensable? Is Dr. Burkitt, the Christian scholar, 
right when he says, “Christianity stands or falls, 
lives or dies, with the personality of Jesus Christ’’? 
We may well face that question and make our an- 
swer as clear and convincing as we can, because to- 
day many people are disturbed in their estimate of 
Jesus. 

There are no barriers that keep out any questions 
now, no sacred preserves where people are afraid 
to push inquiries home. That kind of critical ques- 
tioning arose with enthusiasm and effect at the time 
of the Reformation. Folk then asked questions about 
the church and they were not afraid to push them 
to radical conclusions. But such critical inquiry 
could not stop with the church. It turned next to . 
the Bible. People might shrink from investigating 
the Book, might cry, This is sacred ground and you 
must keep off! But the answer came back with a 
will: Nothing that can be thought about is too sacred 
to be investigated by thought. They searched the 
Old Testament first, then the New Testament, and, 
last of all, the life and person and significance of 
Jesus. 

I am sure that this critical questioning is not only 
necessary to the intellectual integrity of our faith, 
but that it is salutary. Never fear the consequences 


34. 


Belief in Christ 


in the end. That which is true need not dread in- 
vestigation. The Bible will emerge at last, seen in 
a new light, to be sure, reunderstood, reinterpreted, 
but with its central meanings and messages set free 
for a larger service than the church has ever known. 
And Christ can stand investigation—one may be sure 
of that. Only, while the disturbing process is afoot 
there are some things we may well take note of. 
An intelligent Unitarian layman recently said to me 
with indignation: “Those people are trying to take 
the halo away from Jesus.”” Sometimes it does seem 
so, and if Unitarians may be concerned about it, 
surely we may be. 

Obviously this is true that, so far as organized 
Christianity is concerned, the personality of Jesus 
is central. Some of us, for example, deeply desire 
the progressive unification of Christianity. Chris- 
tianity does not mean one thing to-day, but many 
things. It is all split up; it cannot speak with united 
voice about anything. How many different kinds of 
folk call themselves Christian! There are Roman 
Catholics and Protestants a long sea mile apart; high- 
church Episcopalians and Quakers with a deep gulf 
between; modernists and fundamentalists with seri- 
ous divergencies. One wonders sometimes what it 
is that holds Christianity together anyway. 

To be sure, diversity of religious temperament 


85 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


was in evidence long before the Gospel came. There 
were literalists leaning for salvation on a text, and 
mystics feeling religion to be the life of God lived 
out in the soul of man. ‘There were ecclesiastics 
thinking of religion in terms of an authoritative 
organization, and ethicists thinking of religion in 
terms of a moral and serviceable life. There were 
individualists valuing chiefly the inward and trans- 
forming experiences of the soul, and social reformers 
valuing religion for its power to remake the world. 
These differences of religious temperament have not 
only split up Christianity; they have split up Bud- 
dhism in the same way. The sun shines through 
many panes of colored glass and is changed by each. 
So has it been with the Gospel. As in Shelley’s fa- 
mous lines: 


"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity. 7 


Nevertheless, with all these diversities, if you pre- 
sent Christ himself to any Christian, he will kneel. 
Catholics and Protestants are a long way apart, but 
when the Catholic sings the praise of Jesus the Prot- 
estant sings it too. High-church Episcopalians and 
Quakers do not speak the same language in religion, 
but when the Quaker sings Whittier’s hymns to Christ 
the liturgist sings them too. Fundamentalist and 


86 


Belief in Christ 


modernist do not see eye to eye, but when a mod- 
ernist sings, ‘““O Master, let me walk with thee,” the 
fundamentalist sings it too. Christ is the magnet 
that holds this varied mass together. Christ is the 
mountain down which these divided streams flow. 
There is one thing we have in common: we all do 
stand before him and say, “Lord, to whom shall we 
go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” If any- 
body is interested then in the unifying of Christianity, 
Jesus is central. There is only one place where we 
ever can hope to get Christians together, and that is 
around Christ. 

Again, there are some of us profoundly concerned 
about the reformation of Christianity. It needs it. 
To be sure, there are some who still try to think of 
Christianity as a finished article, its dogmas defined, 
its duties formulated, its institutions and rituals com- 
plete and infallible, a finished article merely to be 
accepted. But I do not see how they do it. The 
Gospel of Christ came, an ideal thing, into an unideal 
world and, in Shakespeare’s figure, has been subdued 
like a dyer’s hand to the stuff it works in. 

Think what this world would be if all the Chris- 
tians were really Christian! One-third the popula- 
tion of the planet nominally Christian—what if they 
were really Christian? Forty million people in the 
United States nominally Christian—what if they 

87 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


were really Christian? Nobody who cares for man- 
kind’s future could pray for a better cause than the 
reformation of Christianity. But remember this! 
Whenever in history there has been a real reforma- 
tion of Christianity, which even for a little while 
lifted up the church to be a cleansing and transform- 
ing force in society, at the heart of it somebody had 
rediscovered_Christ. 

It may be Savonarola in the fifteenth century an- 
ticipating the Reformation, cleaning up Florence and 
hurling his challenge at the gross corruption of the 
church, but you could not listen to him for five 
minutes in the Duomo without knowing that what 
had happened to that man was the rediscovery of 
Christ. 

It may be John Wesley, rebelling against the dry- 
as-dust formalism and dead apathy of English Chris- 
tianity in his day, leaving behind the stately edifices 
of the English Church to preach to multitudes on 
the open hillside, but you could not listen to him, 
starting that reform whose consequences are not yet 
done, without seeing that what had happened to him 
was the rediscovery of Jesus Christ. 

When, a few years ago, men like Rauschenbusch 
called us to a social reformation, reminding us that 
in our social life we were doing six days in the week 


88 


Belief in Christ 


things which denied what we said on Sunday, at the 
center of that movement, the secret of its passion and 
its power, was the rediscovery of Christ. 

Young men who ought to go into the ministry, 
come, help us to reform Christianity! Only be sure 
of this: the only kind of reformation that will be 
real must spring from the rediscovery of the message, 
meaning, purpose, and spirit of Jesus. 

From the standpoint of organized Christianity, 
therefore, the personality of the Master is central. 
We never will get Christians together except around 
Him. We never will reform the church except by the 
rediscovery of Him. And, one might add, we never 
will propagate Christianity unless, beyond our theolo- 
gies and our churches with their western histories 
and provincialisms, we primarily present him. 

There are many of you this morning who will take 
this centrality of Jesus for granted and gladly will 
accept those estimates of him in which the historic 
church has voiced its faith. Very well! Your minds 
are clear about that. One need not talk to you. But 
there are others here who will be thinking otherwise. 

Let us see if we can state what their thoughts will 
be. They will be saying that Jesus lived a long time 
ago, that he was a Jewish teacher sixty generations 
behind us, who walked in Galilee, and that all this 

89 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


talk about rediscovering him, organizing people 
around him, presenting him, sounds strange. 


Dim tracts of time divide 
Those golden days from me; 

Thy voice comes strange o’er years of change; 
How can I follow Thee? 


Comes faint and far Thy voice 
From vales of Galilee; 

Thy vision fades in ancient shades; 
How should we follow Thee? 


And these people will be saying further that Lowell 
spoke truth when he remarked that every man is the 
prisoner of his date, that is, every man is limited by 
the ways of thinking of his generation. So was it 
with Jesus, they say. He did not know our modern 
science; he had other ways of thinking of the uni- 
verse, of disease, of the consummation of the age. 
If he had not thought the way his generation thought 
he never could have been understood by his genera- 
tion at all. But that fact takes him a long way from 
our generation. He does not belong to our time. 
How shall we follow him? 

And some minds here will go further and say that 
those terms which the first century used about Jesus 
—Messiah,” that the Jewish Christians employed, 
and “Logos,” or “Lord,” that the Greek Christians 

90 


Belief in Christ 


used—were terms perfectly familiar in the first cen- 
tury, but familiar to us no more. They were in ex- 
istence before Jesus came; they had been used upon 
other people before they were used on him; and if 
we are going to have the facts, they say, we must go 
back behind these categories of understanding, which 
the first century used and recover in our imagination 
the individual human figure of the Man of Nazareth. 
When we do that, they think, we will find an en- 
gaging and delightful personality but, after all, a 
Jewish teacher of the first century concerning whom 
there is no use fooling ourselves that he is anything 
more. 

I need not tell you such thoughts are going through 
the minds of this generation, not born of irreverence, 
but of desire to be honest with the facts. That is 
what my Unitarian friend meant when he spoke of 
folks who take the halo from Jesus. 

Now, I accept that challenge this morning. [I ac- 
cept it without denying any of these facts we have 
been rehearsing. Jesus did live a long time ago, 
and it is amazing that one who lived so long ago 
should make himself indispensable to our spiritual 
life. It is true that he thought as his generation 
thought about many things and could not have been 
understood by his generation had that not been so. 
And it is true that if we are to get at the facts we 


sal 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


must recover the human figure of the Man of Naza- 
reth. As a teacher in a theological seminary it is 
my business to know what is being found out about 
problems like this. But the more I know the more 
sure I am that in the personality of the Man of 
Nazareth we are dealing not with a mere Jewish 
teacher of the first century, but with the transcendent 
gift of God to the spiritual life of man. 

How do we test anything in the long run anyway? 
Do we not ask what it does, what purposes it serves, 
what differences it makes to life? What is electric- 
ity? I don’t know; you don’t know; nobody knows. 
Change the question then. What does electricity 
do? What are the differences that electricity makes 
to life? One can grow eloquent about that. Elec- 
tricity does this and this and this—these manifold 
and marvelous differences it makes to men. Very 
well, I answer, then you have discovered something 
very significant about what electricity is, for electric- 
ity must be the kind of force that can do what it 
does. 

Will you approach Christ like that? Who is 
Christ? You may be puzzled. You may share the 
uncertainties of your day. You may even fear that 
time will show that he is just a Jewish teacher of 
the first century. Very well! Change the question. 

What has Jesus done? What difference has he made 
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Belief in Christ 


to human life? That is an historic matter. You can 
get your hands on that. You can state that. And 
as I sketchily state it the recurring theme of our 
argument is this: he must be the kind of person 
who can do what he has done. 

For one thing, he has given man his loftiest idea 
of God, not so much by what he said as by what 
“he was. That is an amazing thing to have done. 
In day dreams one may imagine all sorts of wild, 
incredible things he might achieve, but one thing I 
cannot imagine: that one of us could live a life of 
such self-authenticating spiritual grandeur that nine- 
teen centuries from now a man like Browning would 
be saying about us: 


The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too. 


I cannot imagine that. Jesus did it. In a world 
where multitudes have groped after God, guessed 
about God, philosophized about God, he lived a life 
of such self-authenticating spiritual grandeur that 
increasing multitudes of people when they try to 
think about God can say nothing so true, so satisfy- 
ing, so adequate; as to say that God is like Christ. 
That is an amazing thing. He did it. He must have 
been the kind of person who could do what he has 
done. 


93 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


Again, he gave the world its loftiest estimate of 
man. That is an amazing thing too. For it is not 
easy to hold high estimates of man. There are so 
many of us— 


The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured 
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour. 


Human life so often, too, is sordid, unlovely, igno- 
ble; we display our low estimates of men in our 
cruelty to each other in personal relationships, in 
industry, in war. It is not easy to hold high esti- 
mates of man. But Jesus taught that personality in 
every man or woman, in every king or child, is in- 
finitely precious. And, what is more, he lived as 
though that were true. He taught men to believe 
in their divine origin, their spiritual nature, their 
boundless possibilities. He sent men out saying 
about themselves what men had never said about 
themselves before: ‘“Now are we children of God, and 
it is not yet made manifest what we shall be.” That 
is an amazing thing to have done. Christ’s idea of 
human value haunts us continually. We have tried 
to work out a little of it in democracy, giving every 
personality a chance. We have tried to take out of 
human life sins, like slavery, which desecrate human 
souls. We hate war because it debauches personal- 
ity. And in philanthropy we are trying to open doors 
94. 


Belief in Christ 


that handicapped personalities may have a chance. 
Wherever Jesus goes he lifts immeasurably man’s 
estimate of his own worth. That is a most aston- 
ishing thing! He must be the kind of person who 
could do what he has done. 

Once more, the Master has given the world its 
loftiest ethical ideals. That is strange, because ethi- 
cal ideals change. They are subject to the flux of 
time, the alteration of circumstance. As was said 
long ago, what is right on one side of the Pyrenees 
is wrong on the other. It is not easy to make a 
statement about duty in terms of to-day that will 
hold good a hundred years to come, to say nothing 
of a thousand. Yet it was not a preacher, it was 
Glenn Frank, the editor of the Century Magazine, 
who told us the other day that if we Christians 
would only go back behind our controversies to the 
ethical teachings of Jesus, we would find something 
timeless and eternal. As a matter of fact, whenever 
we do think about what is right, we find Jesus not 
behind us; he is ahead of us, rallying us, challenging 
us, alluring us to an adventure toward himself. 

And when one thinks of what his teaching has 
meant to personal character—of all the strong men 
like Chinese Gordon who wished that they were as 
strong as Christ; of all the pure women like St. Cath- 
erine who wished they were as pure as Christ; of 


2) 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


all the adventurous spirits like Livingstone who 
wished they were as daring as Christ; of all the 
patient souls like Stevenson who wished they were 
as patient as Christ; of all the unselfish men like 
Booth who wished they were as unselfish as Christ 
—it is amazing! And he must have been the kind 
of person who could do what he has done. 

Again, he not only presented to man his highest 
ideal, but he supplied power. That is strange. 
Wherever the Gospel of Jesus has gone, there men 
have known that they had access into a great re- 
source of spiritual power. At Marston Moor, when 
the Puritans and the Cavaliers were lining up against 
each other and the engagement was about to begin, 
they say that far over the plain the figure of Oliver 
Cromwell came riding and that at the sight of him 
the Puritans set up a great, victorious shout as though 
their battle already had been won. There has been 
many a battle for goodness on this planet in indi- 
vidual hearts and in social life where the figure of 
Christ seemed to come up over the horizon and men 
sent up a triumphant shout as though their battle 
already had been won. Paul in the first century 
cried, ‘‘I can do all things in him that strengtheneth 
me.’’ And just this last week, a young Chinese, tak- 
ing his advanced degree at Columbia, came to make 
his first public confession of Christ. He is going 

96 


Belief in Christ 


back to be a superintendent of schools in China, and 
he said: “I want Christ. I want Christ because I 
want spiritual power to serve my people in this next 
generation.” Christ has opened innumerable doors 
to spiritual power. And he must have been the kind 
of person who could do what he has done. 

Once more, as a matter of historical fact, Jesus 
has given us the transcendent exhibition of trust in 
spiritual forces. It is not easy for us to trust spiritual 
forces. We are timid about it. We are like the 
ancient Sadducee who cried, ““My right arm is my 
god.” We understand cynical sayings like “Fortune 
is always on the side of the largest battalions,” or 
“Trust God, and keep your powder dry.’ And we 
smile knowingly when people say that trying to hold 
humanity together by spiritual forces is like trying 
to hold the carriages of a railroad train together by 
relying on the friendly feelings of the engineer for 
the conductor. It is hard for us to trust spiritual 
forces. Then Jesus came and did a thing that in 
range of influence is not simply unique; on a priori 
grounds it is incredible. It is as though he said, 
I am going to turn the world upside down; I am going 
to wield an influence such as no one in history has 
wielded. Two thousand years from now I am go- 
ing to hold sway over the imaginations of men and 
commandeer their allegiance as no emperor nor phi- 

97 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


losopher has ever done, and I am going to do it by 
spiritual forces: truth, persuasion, love, and nothing 
else. I will trust them to the limit, rely on them 
even though it cost the Cross, and I will win an in- 
fluence that never has been won before. 

I challenge you. Is there any proposition that on 
a priori grounds is more essentially incredible? And 
he has done it. It is history now. This next week 
more millions of knees will bow at the thought of 
the Cross than ever in history. But that is not all. 
The most impressive fact is that he is winning us 
to his principle. We are beginning to see that only 
as we take our homes from the régime of violence to 
the régime of spiritual forces have we good homes, 
that only as we take our schools from the régime 
of force to the régime of spiritual forces have we 
right schools; that only as we carry our international 
relationships out from the domain of force to the 
governance of spiritual forces can we have a decent 
world. He is going to win the consent of mankind 
to his incredible formula. The future belongs to 
him. Only in spiritual forces is there any hope for 
the redemption of the world. It is amazing, and 
he must have been the kind of person who could do 
what he has done. 

We have not touched the garment’s hem of what 
he really did. We have said these things, not be- 

98 


Belief in Christ 


cause we think them remotely adequate, but because 
even such a sketchy presentation must make clear 
that when you go back to that figure in the first 
century you are not dealing with a diminished rabbi; 
you are dealing with a transcendent personality, the 
supreme gift of God to man. Do you really gather 
up in your imagination what it means to us that he 
must be the kind of person who could do what he 
has done—giving the world its loftiest idea of God, 
its highest estimate of man, its noblest ethical ideals, 
its deepest spiritual resources, its transcendent exhi- 
bition of trust in spiritual power? ‘To be the kind 
of person who could do that! 

I am a liberal. I am not afraid to ask questions 
about anything. But a personality who is the kind 
of being that can do that clearly deserves a place 
at the center of my understanding of God and man. 
“God was in Christ.” What less than that can you 
say? If you do not find God there, then where will 
you find him? With Charles Lamb I say that if 
Shakespeare should come in here now I would stand 
up; if Christ should come in here I would kneel. 

What are you going to do about it? Do you really 
believe this? Then it means putting Christ at the 
center of your life. It means taking him in earnest 
in your private character, in your family, and in all 
your social relationships. It means saying as Simon 


99 


Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D. 


Peter did long ago, turning his back upon every other 
way of life: ‘“Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast 
the words of eternal life. And we have believed and 
know that thou art the Holy One of God.” 


100 


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Dr. Gilkey was born in the Old Bay State in 1882, graduated 
at Harvard University and Union Theological Seminary, with 
further studies at the Universities of Berlin and Marburg, as 
well as Free Church College, Glasgow; New College, Edin- 
burgh, and Oxford. He was ordained to the Baptist ministry 
in 1910, and has since been pastor of the Hyde Park Baptist 
Church, Chicago: his only parish so far, marked by a distin- 
guished and fruitful ministry. He is a university preacher of 
unique persuasiveness, having served at Harvard, Yale, Prince- 
ton, Cornell, Toronto, Chicago, Stanford, and Purdue. During 
the past summer he visited India as interpreter, on the Bar- 
rows Foundation, of the genius of Christian faith to the men 
of the East. It was my delight to hear the present sermon 
on a hot day in July in the Park Avenue Baptist Church, New 
York, and as a parable of the spiritual life I do not know 
another like it in our language for its thrill, its challenge, and 
its wealth of inspiration and suggestion. The reverent attitude 
of the preacher, his quiet conversational style—like a teacher 
telling a tale—his evocation of the religious atmosphere, and 
the eager intentness with which the people listened—it was a 
scene and a sacrament not to be forgotten. Dr. Gilkey is in 
the prime and glory of his ministry which, if rich in achieve- 
ment, is richer still in its promise of wise leadership in the 
culture of the life of the spirit. 


THE MOUNTAINS OF GOD 


CHARLES W. GILKEY 
HYDE PARK BAPTIST CHURCH, CHICAGO 


“Thy lovingkindness, O Jehovah, is in the heavens; 
Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies. 
Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God.” 
Psalm 36: 5-6. A. R. V. 


A few years ago I spent a week in the high Alps, 
at Wengen in Switzerland, close up under one of the 
famous mountains of the world. The Jungfrau— 
great cresting wave of ice and snow forever about 
to break over the Lauterbrunnen Valley deep below 
us—dominated our whole life there at Wengen with 
that silent, mysterious, irresistible authority with 
which a high mountain always rules the region round 
it. The very pension in which we lived was called 
the “Jungfraublick”; and from its garden and win- 
dows we could watch the great mountain at all hours 
and in all weathers. There were rainy days that 
week when the clouds shut in low-roofed and gray 
as a flat ceiling; on those days we would never have 
known that the Jungfrau was there at all, unless we 
reminded ourselves that it was the power of the 
mountain which had drawn about her from the blue 

103 


Charles W. Gilkey 


Mediterranean a hundred and fifty miles away, the 
very clouds that hid her from our sight. 

There was one day that week never to be forgotten 
while life lasts: not a cloud in the whole heaven, and 
every foot of that jagged crest, clear up to the shin- 
ing summit, sharp and white against the infinite blue. 
All the incredible glories of a perfect day in the high 
Alps, from the cold splendors of the sunrise to the 
warm pink of the evening after-glow, unrolled like 
a slow panorama of color and majesty before our 
half-incredulous eyes. It seemed almost too beauti- 
ful to be real. 

One other day that week, almost as vivid in mem- 
ory, has since come to be even richer in significance. 
We had gone for a long walk that afternoon, and 
seated ourselves presently on one of the benches that 
the Swiss hotel-keepers provide for their pedestrian 
guests at commanding points of view. While our 
backs had been turned to the mountain, a strange 
thing had happened. A wreath of mist and cloud 
had gathered just below the summit, exactly as if 
the maiden for whom the mountain is named had 
flung about her neck and shoulders a gray scarf of 
the finest silk. As the eye ran up from the Lauter- 
brunnen Valley far beneath, across the green fields 
and darker pines, across the reddish-brown rocks 
where the grass runs out, and then across, the 


104 


The Mountains of God 


wrinkled, half-dirty glaciers—our view of the moun- 
tain stopped short at this silken veil. But higher 
up, above the cloud, hanging apparently suspended 
in the sky, shining white with the sun full on it, 
was something incredibly beautiful to look upon. 
It might have been a summer afternoon cloud, huge 
and soft and white in the sunlight, but certain soon 
to dissolve, or it might be the snowy summit of the 
Jungfrau. Which was it? For the moment, as we 
sat there, our eyes could not tell. 

As we sat watching that mystery in the sky, it 
suddenly flashed upon me that there before us in 
symbol was the characteristic question and perplex- 
ity of our half-incredulous modern age about re- 
ligion. Thoughtful men look up at our Christian 
faith in a good God Who is our Father, in the im- 
mortal life which He has opened before us, in the 
coming Kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy 
which is His eternal purpose for His children; and 
many of them feel about it all very much as we felt 
looking up at the Jungfrau that afternoon. Re- 
ligion is certainly very beautiful as it shines there 
in our human sky, hanging mysteriously between the 
heaven above us and the earth beneath us, with all 
the light of our deepest longings and highest aspira- 
tions upon it. We should very much like to believe 
it true. But is it really any more than a summer 


105 


Charles W. Gilkey 


cloud, born of our traditions and habits and hopes, 
and reasonably certain to dissolve and disappear 
when the clear dry light of our modern science and 
philosophy have worked on it a little longer? Or is 
it really, as it claims, the summit of all human life 
and experience, where men may actually meet the 
Invisible God above them, and become themselves 
a part of His Eternal Order and Purpose? What is 
there in religion? 

Now it was plainly no original idea of mine that 
the high mountains could be of some help to us in 
answering that question. Long centuries ago a He- 
brew poet put this same conviction into words far 
more memorable than any we can find: 


Thy lovingkindness, O Jehovah, is in the heavens; 
Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies. 
Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God. 


And even more familiar is the somewhat different 
turn given to a very similar thought in Psalm 125: 


As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, 
So Jehovah is round about his people 
From this time forth and forevermore. 


I have wondered often, since that day at Wengen, 
just what it was that suggested this great comparison 
to the Psalmist long ago. What is the precise point 

106 


The Mountains of God 


of similarity between religion in human experience, 
and the high mountains, that underlies his magnifi- 
cent figures of speech? Was it the silence that is 
common to both? Religion at its best never makes 
a great noise in human life; neither do the moun- 
tains. Or was it their mystery? The great experi- 
ences and faiths of religion are not by any means 
always clear even to those who live closest to them; 
neither are the mountains. Or was it the authority 
that, in spite of this mystery and silence, gives the 
mountains so central a place and so mighty an influ- 
ence in the life of the region and the people round 
about them? Just such a silent, mysterious, domi- 
nating authority has religion always exercised in the 
lives of men who have once felt its power. Or was 
it the sense of security, unanalyzed but pervasive 
and controlling, that, as the Psalmist explicitly re- 
minds us, steadies and reassures the mountain-dweller 
and the religious man alike? 

Whatever the insight that first prompted this com- 
parison, it has not been limited to religious thinkers 
and poets of long ago. When I was a student in 
Germany in 1909, I came across a German transla- 
tion of an anonymous article entitled “Credo,” that 
had appeared in the Hibbert Journal for April of 
that year. I was so impressed by the translation 
that I hunted up the English original and copied two 

107 


Charles W. Gilkey 


or three sentences from it upon a card which I still 
have, faded and soiled with much loaning and re- 
peated reference. It has since transpired that the 
author was the editor himself, Principal L. P. Jacks 
of Manchester College, Oxford, for whose thoughts 
on religion the whole western world has learned to 
listen. Here are the memorable sentences upon the 
card: 


Religion therefore does not apologize for itself, does not 
stand on the defensive, does not justify its presence in the 
world. If theorists would vindicate Religion, they may do so: 
but Religion comes forth in the majesty of silence, like a 
mountain amid the lifting mists. All the strong things of the 
world are its children; and whatever strength is summoned to 
its support is the strength which its own spirit has called into 
being. 


We have good precedent, therefore, both ancient 
and modern, both Scriptural and literary, for asking 
the mountains to help us answer this prevalent and 


characteristic question of our modern age: what is 
there in religion, or to it? 


I 


There is reality in religion. Of course there are 
hundreds of American tourists who on some hurried 
travel-bureau schedule go up from Visp to Zermatt 
hoping for a glimpse of the Matterhorn. All their 

108 


The Mountains of God 


lives they have seen pictures—keep one hanging in 
their home perhaps—of that gigantic forefinger of 
rock with its nail of ice, pointing up into the open 
heaven. It has been one of the ambitions of their 
European trip to see the Matterhorn for themselves. 
But as they leave the train, the clouds are hanging 
thick over Zermatt, and drifting in wisps among the 
pine trees close at hand. No Matterhorn anywhere 
to be seen! And all day long, as they sit anxious and 
eager on the hotel veranda, or wander up and down 
the narrow village street, there is never a glimpse 
of the mountain, and only guesses from pictures and 
conversation as to where it stands hidden from their 
sight. The inexorable necessities of an American 
sight-seeing schedule that whirls them through Eu- 
rope largely on “one-night stands,” drag them sorely 
disappointed to the train down the steep valley 
again. Have they seen the Matterhorn? No. But 
would they be foolish enough to tell their friends 
at home that, having been to Zermatt for themselves 
and seen nothing worth while, they have concluded 
that there is no real basis for all this talk about the 
Matterhorn? 

Yet otherwise sensible people are continually mak- 
ing a similar snap-judgment about religion. They 
happen into church some Sunday morning just to 
see what it is like, and find the sermon dull—as it 


109 


Charles W. Gilkey 


doubtless frequently is—and the service uninterest- 
ing—as it must be where there is no spontaneous 
spirit of worship to quicken it into life. Or they 
drop a remark or raise a question to some religiously 
minded friend, but the ensuing conversation does not 
find a real trail that leads anywhere. Quite as often 
perhaps there is no pretense of or interest in any 
personal verification. On the slender basis of some 
such hasty glimpse or complacent indifference, rests 
the cocksure comment: “Religion? Nothing to it.” 

The reality of religion vindicates itself, mysterious 
and obscure as it often seems at first sight, by three 
tests strikingly similar to those by which the moun- 
tain evidences itself as real. In both cases it is 
constantly necessary, first, to check present perplex- 
ities by past experiences. What finally assured us 
that afternoon on the Swiss bench that the shining 
something we saw in the sky was not a summer cloud 
soon to dissolve, but the mountain’s solid summit? 
Not so much our doubtful eyes, as our vivid memo- 
ries. The day of the long walk to the bench came 
after the cloudless day, when the outline of the suc- 
cessive crests of the Monch and the Eiger and the 
Jungfrau had fixed itself so sharply upon my memory 
that to this day I can shut my eyes and see that 
magnificent sky-line. And as on the bench that 
afternoon I compared that vivid memory with ‘the 


110 


The Mountains of God 


upper edge of the enigma in the sky, I became slowly 
sure that it was no summer cloud, but the mountain 
itself. 

Now there are great moments of insight in re- 
ligious experience, comparable to that perfect day 
in the mountains. They may be as rare in a life- 
time as such days are in some Alpine summers; but 
when they do come, they are no less real and reveal- 
ing. They show us where the heights really lie, 
and which are highest. Religion has its own distinc- 
tive names for these unusual experiences: the older 
phraseology called them conversion, regeneration, 
sanctification, the second blessing, the baptism of the 
Spirit; the newer vocabulary speaks of insight, ex- 
altation, mystic union, communion with God. What- 
ever the terms we use, the common fact of spiritual 
experience is that most of us have to orient our lives 
through many dull and even dark days, by what 
we can see clearly only now and then. As Matthew 
Arnold puts it: 


Thy tasks in hours of insight willed 
May be in hours of gloom fulfilled. 


But there are many folk to whom these hours of 
clear religious insight seem not to come—or at least 
seem to have stopped coming. They hear others 
tell of their conversion, or of some deep mystical 

111 


Charles W. Gilkey 


experience in worship or prayer; and complain in 
all sincerity that they do not understand what it is 
all about. There remains for them a second test, by 
which the Jungfrau also evidences herself through 
the considerable periods when clear days do not come. 
The Swiss mountaineer can tell us best what this test 
is. If he were to add up in parallel columns for 
any month, or at least for any year, the number of 
days when he sees the high mountains and those 
when he does not, there would doubtless often be 
more in the second column than in the first. But 
though he may not see the mountain half the time, 
it is constantly proving itself a dominating fact at 
a dozen important points in his daily experience. 
Its influence is woven into the very texture of his 
living. ‘The mountain makes his climate, summon- 
ing and precipitating the snow and rain that water 
his garden and provide pasture for his flocks. The 
fame and beauty of the mountain attract visitors 
from all over the world, who insure the economic 
prosperity of his little valley. More than that, the 
mountain molds his character. The historic “Cradle 
of Liberty” is not so truly, as we provincial New 
Englanders suppose, in Faneuil Hall in Boston, as 
it is in those Swiss mountain valleys where since the 
Middle Ages fathers and sons have loved their free- 
dom, and fought and died to maintain it. The Swiss 
Liz 


The Mountains of God 


mountaineer is chiefly sure of the mountain because 
he lives with it, and finds it a dependable and domi- 
nating factor in his daily experience. 

Just so, in spite of all the mysteries and obscurities 
which we cannot completely escape or explain, is it 
with religion. Its best evidence is the stimulating 
and molding influence which it can and does bring 
to bear throughout the whole range of higher human 
living. It becomes the central and dominating fact 
of life to those who really live with it; who, in the 
language of the Psalms, ‘‘abide under the shadow 
of the Almighty.” 

One other test remains, for those who have the 
patience and determination to apply it. A man may 
climb the mountain for himself, and, standing upon 
its topmost summit, look out upon the world below 
with that exaltation and exultation which only the 
man who stood there ever knows. Just so a man 
may experience religion in some such conclusive 
fashion as shall give him the personal assurance of 
the climber who has himself ‘‘been up there.” But, 
if one is to apply that decisive test of personal ex- 
perience in either realm, there are some necessary 
conditions which must first be met. Men do not 
achieve any of the heights of life without prolonged 
previous self-discipline. Weak muscles and weak 
wills must first be hardened by patient training in 


113 


Charles W. Gilkey 


self-mastery. The heart must be strengthened till 
it can bear its unusual burden upward step by step, 
in spite of the rarer air, all the way to the summit. 
The head must be steadied until it can look far down 
without dizziness and far up without discouragement 
—a steadiness which as Jesus warned us is not easily 
achieved in things spiritual, where most of us fall 
victims to pride the moment we climb a little way 
above our fellows, or to lack of faith when we look 
up toward God. Nor is this preparatory period of 
training either easy or short. 


Let no man think that sudden in a minute 
All is accomplished and the work is done;— 
Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it 
Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun. 


But to him who will meet these inexorable con- 
ditions, the heights of life are accessible on the same 
terms as the summits of the Alps. 

While we are thinking of reality in religion, one 
other point is not without present-day significance. 
Suppose a geological expedition were to examine some 
side valley or shoulder of the mountain and after 
careful research with the best technique and highest 
scholarship available should come back to report that 
the geological structure and history of that region 
were somewhat different from what had previously 


114 


The Mountains of God 


been supposed. We should all agree that our geo- 
logical theories and text-books must be revised to 
accord with this new knowledge—but we should 
never fear that anything serious had happened, or 
could happen, to the mountain itself. Scientific ex- 
peditions will come and go over the mountain for 
centuries to come, and will revise and correct their 
text-books and their theories times without number; 
but the mountain itself will outlast them all, sum- 
moning its storms and calling its lovers and support- 
ing the dwellers in its shadow, down through the 
generations. Just so is it in religious history and 
experience. Improved scholarship will doubtless 
continue for centuries to come, as for decades past, 
to make new discoveries about the authorship of 
the Pentateuch and the Psalms and the prophets, 
the history of Christianity and of other religions, the 
psychological processes of religious experience, the 
evolution of life upon this planet; and these dis- 
coveries may require the frequent revision of our 
theological text-books and theories. But meanwhile 
religion itself will continue to grip and bless and 
sustain the hearts of men, pointing and lifting them 
up toward God and duty and immortality, with solid 
ground beneath their feet as they climb. The moun- 
tain itself standeth sure, however men’s theories 
about it may change. 
115 


Charles W. Gilkey 


Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place 

In all generations. 

Before the mountains were brought forth, 

Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, 
Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. 


% 


II 


But, further, there is power in religion. That 
summer in Switzerland the railway stations were 
placarded with picturesque posters, inviting the Swiss 
people to subscribe their savings toward a bond issue 
to complete the electrification of the railroads. They 
are in part electrified already. On the ride up the 
steep valley from Visp to Zermatt to see the Mat- 
terhorn, the train slips into motion without a jerk 
and slides up the stiffest grades apparently with 
almost as much ease as it would coast down. The 
power that drives that train, and scores of others at 
the same time, is ‘“‘white coal,” brought not from a 
mine but from a dynamo. The dynamo is driven 
by a mountain stream. The stream gets its energy 
from the mountain’s height, and is itself made up 
from a thousand trickling rivulets fed by the slow 
glaciers and the eternal snows. And these in their 
turn are born in a process over which nature always 
throws a veil of impenetrable cloud. When it rains 
or snows on the mountains, we in the valleys be- 


116 


The Mountains of God 


low can see the results, but never the process itself. 
Any one who starts out to investigate that process 
soon discovers how very easy it is to lose one’s way 
in the veil of mystery that always surrounds it. All 
that we can see from the valleys is that next morn- 
ing, when the clouds have cleared, the summits are 
shining white with new-fallen snow, and all the 
streams are brimming with fresh energy. Just so 
is it with men’s communion with God in worship 
and in prayer. ‘The results are plain to see, even 
though the process is obscure to trace. So Jesus 
hinted when he said: ‘‘But thou, when thou prayest, 
enter into thy closet, and, when thou hast shut thy 
door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy 
Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee 
openly.” 


As torrents in summer, 
Half dried in their channels, 
Suddenly rise, though the 
Sky is still cloudless, 

For rain has been falling 
Far off at their fountains, 


So hearts that are fainting 
Grow full to o’erflowing, 
And they that behold it 
Marvel and know not 
That God at their fountains 
Far off has been raining. 


117 


Charles W. Gilkey 


In a sermon that I heard twenty years ago as an 
undergraduate, that thinker-poet among great Amer- 
ican preachers, Dr. George A. Gordon of Boston, 
pointed out that high mountain ranges may be prof- 
itably studied from various and complementary 
points of view. The geologist, the botanist, the biol- 
ogist, the sociologist, the historian, will all find re- 
warding fields for research in the Alps or the 
Himalayas. But not the least significant aspect of 
the mountains is their strange power over the in- 
visible air above them, out of which they draw down 
the snow and rain that bring fertility and potential 
energy to all the region round. So is it also, he said, 
of human nature. We may profitably study the 
processes of its development, the influence of its en- 
vironment, the history of its achievements. But not 
the least significant of its aspects is its strange power 
over the Invisible above it; its religious capacity to 
draw down blessing from its contact and communion 
with the Unseen. 

And he might have gone on to point out, as Dr. 
Henry S. Coffin has done so vividly in his latest 
book, that the spiritual power thus generated in per- 
sonal religious experience, manifests and applies it- 
self over all the broad areas of human life. The 
same stream that drives the Swiss dynamos rushes 
on into the valley to water the gardens and wash 

118 


The Mountains of God 


the stained garments of the peasants who live there; 
further still, it supports and makes possible the stren- 
uous progress of the swimmer from bank to bank; 
lower yet, flowing into the Rhine or the Rhone, it 
bears up the heavily laden barges of a national and 
international commerce; and if the returning Ameri- 
can traveler chance to embark at Rotterdam, his 
ocean liner will steer out into the sunset on the 
broad bosom of that same widening stream. So the 
spiritual energy that is created when men meet with 
God in public worship and in private prayer, flows 
down across all the continent of human life, bring- 
ing power for their tasks, fertility and beauty to 
their gardens, forgiveness and cleansing for their sins, 
and support for their heaviest burdens. And when 
at last we too are homeward bound, out of the river 
toward the ocean and the sunset, religion bears us 
up in faith and immortal hope on our voyage over 
strange seas to the Other Shore. 


TIT 


One other thing there is in religion, the right word 
for which is not easy to find. It often begins as 
adventure. Some of us are so constituted that in the 
mountains we cannot be satisfied to sit too long upon 
the hotel veranda, or even to loiter along the village 

119 


Charles W. Gilkey 


street; Alpenstock in hand and Rucksack on our 
backs, we too must be up and climbing. The spell 
of the mountains is on us, and will not let us go. 
But when our daily climbs have taken us up to the 
higher ranges where-the trees and grass run out, the 
patches of snow begin, the brooks trickle white from 
under the glaciers, and the nearer summits beckon 
close at hand, then adventure becomes discovery. 
That is the only word for it, when one looks down 
from some superb prospect upon the huddled houses 
and the crawling train in the valley far below, and 
then again up, above the winding glaciers all around, 
to the snow-crowned summits beyond. It is all a new 
world. But I notice that a friend of mine who once 
climbed the Matterhorn always uses still another 
word when he describes his experience on that sum- 
mit. He calls it a revelation. 

So there are some men who begin the religious 
quest as an heroic adventure of human spirit when 
it is restless and dissatisfied in the comfortable val- 
leys of life, and eager to attempt its higher ranges. 
But what started as a spiritual adventure becomes 
then the discovery of a new world around and be- 
yond them, whose wonder they never guessed from 
the valleys below, and whose power over and within 
them grows with every experience of it. At first they 
had thought it was only their own aspiration that 

120 





The Mountains of God 


urged them upward; but later they found a world 
of realities around and above them as they climbed, 
which those never discover who are content to re- 
main always in the valley. Then it appeared that 
the urge within, which had kept them climbing, was 
the strengthening response of their own souls to this 
new world of truth and beauty and goodness which 
is God’s own country. And when there they meet 
with Him, and in His presence look out upon life 
as He sees it—the word which religion has always 
used for that ultimate experience is not simply ad- 
venture and aspiration, nor even discovery, but rev- 
elation. 

These heights most men do not attain by them- 
selves alone—nor yet without a guide. They told 
us in Zermatt that all the serious accidents there- 
abouts for many years had befallen those who were 
foolish enough to risk high climbing alone, or in a 
company of amateurs without an experienced guide. 
It is not done that way in the mountains—or in re- 
ligion. We rope ourselves together in the spiritual 
fellowship of a church, or at the very least in the 
company of others like-minded, in order that if any 
slip, he may not utterly fall. And when we find a 
guide who knows the way to the summit, we follow 
him implicitly. | 

In the main street of Chamonix, under the very 


121 


Charles W. Gilkey 


shadow of Mont Blanc, stands a monument com- 
memorative of the first ascent of the mountain in 
1787. The figure of the Genevan naturalist, De 
Saussure, is standing erect, looking up at the moun- 
tain itself; and one look at his face tells the visitor 
what is in his heart. Beside him, bent over with 
eagerness, one hand pointing the way up, is the guide, 
Jacques Balmat, who in the previous year had made 
his way to the summit. One who tarries a little 
beneath the monument can almost hear the guide 
saying to the other, as he stands there gripped by 
the grandeur and the challenge of the monarch of 
the Alps: ‘Come. I’ve been up there. I know the 
way. Follow me, and we'll go up together.” 

Just so Jesus Christ comes to each one of us, as 
we catch sight of the heights of life, the presence 
of God, the world unseen and eternal; and feel in 
our deepest souls their challenge and claim upon us. 
His hand rests in comradeship and encouragement 
upon our shoulder; His outstretched arm points out 
the climbing path ahead; His voice speaks, quiet. 
but confident, in our ear. ‘‘Come. I’ve been there. 
I know the way. Follow me, and we will go to- 
gether.” 


122 





Born in Pittsburgh thirty-nine years ago, Dr. Luccock was 
educated at Northwestern University and Union Seminary and 
entered the Methodist ministry in 1910. After two pastorates 
in Connecticut he became instructor in the New Testament in 
Drew Theological Seminary, and, later, Editorial Secretary of 
the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions. At the last Gen- 
eral Conference Dr. Luccock was made contributing editor to 
all the leading journals of the Methodist Church. Among his 
earlier writings are Fares, Please and Skylines, brief, vivid, 
sparkling essays uniting human passion and spiritual insight 
with delicious humor and a unique gift of putting old truths 
as if they were new discoveries. His recently published book 
of sermons, The Haunted House, took everybody captive, as 
witness the verdict of a keen appraiser: 

“Right in our own day a new sort of sermon has been 
evolved. This new sermon is written by a man of letters who 
reads everything and lets every characteristic aspect of Amer- 
ican life blow through his mind as the winds blow through the 
leaves of the trees. Then he brings all this knowledge and 
feeling to the test of the great experiences and expressions of 
the Old and New Testaments. The contrast is something 
electric. William James jostles Jeremiah, and James Robinson 
is found in the company of the Apostle Paul. Neither Chris- 
topher Morley nor Don Marquis has a more intimate contact 
with all that is going on in the big towns of to-day. And no 
paragraph writer has a surer command of speech which leaves 
burrs sticking in the mind than has Dr. Luccock. But all this 
sensitive apprehension of the waves of feeling which run 
through the life of our people, all this capacity to find the 
arresting word and the cohesive phrase, are brought to the 
service of a Christian interpretation of the problems which 
beset men to-day. You feel as if preaching is a new and fresh 
adventure.” 


THE OLD-TIME RELIGION * 


HALFORD E. LUCCOCK, D.D. 
EDITORIAL SECRETARY, METHODIST BOARD OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 


“By faith Abraham went forth, although he did not know 
where he was to go.” Hebrews 11: 8. 
“Let my people go!” Exodus 5: 1. 


The principal trouble with “‘the old-time religion,” 
as that phrase is frequently understood, is that it is 
not old enough! We are all familiar with the song, 
usually pealed out in lusty tones: 


Give to me the old-time religion, 
It’s good, enough for me! 

It was good enough for Moses, 
It was good enough for father, 
It was good enough for mother, 
And it’s good enough for me! 


What a man who sings that song is clamoring for, 
when it is anything more than an emotional outlet, 
is not nearly so old as he thinks it is. He is usually 
thinking of the exact form of religious expression and 

1From The Haunted House and Other Sermons. Copyrighted 


1923, by Halford E. Luccock. Used by courtesy of The Abingdon 
Press, Inc. 
Le: 


Halford E. Luccock, D.D. 


practice familiar to him as a boy. And that is a very 
modern invention, comparatively speaking. 

The particular combination of ideas and customs 
which is dignified by the title of “old-time religion” 
is frequently like one of the modern spurious paint- 
ings passed off on the uninitiated as an ‘“‘old master.” 
It is not a genuine “antique,” which dates back to 
the creative days of the faith, but a local version 
which flourished about 1850, or at best in the middle 
of the seventeenth century. This whole sermon can 
be put into one sentence: If you want the “old-time 
religion”—and nothing is so desperately needed by 
the world to-day—be sure you get it old enough. 
Do not run back into the sixteenth century and stop 
there. Insist on the real thing. Go clear back to 
the beginning. 

Notice swiftly three things about the frequent 
longing for “the old-time religion” with its inevitable 
implied disparagement of the Christian faith of the 
present day. 

First, the sighing for the religion of yesterday is a 
delusion. Of course religion ought to be old. It 
can’t be worth much if it is not. The sun which 
lights the earth was not made yesterday. The hills 
which give birth to the streams which water the earth 
are not a twentieth-century product. When we wish 
to mark a thing as being really old we can say ncth- 

126 


The Old-Time Religion 


ing so strong as that it is as “old as the hills.” A 
religion to be worth anything must be so old as to be 
timeless. This truth is expressed in one of the most 
picturesque and suggestive titles of God in the Old 
Testament, ‘“The Ancient of Days.” It is only when 
we can say, ‘“‘Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place 
in all generations,” that we feel the lifting power 
of faith. 

But while all that is eternally true usually the 
cry for the old-time religion is not a thirsting for the 
universal, timeless elements of religion—those large 
aspects of Christian truth which are the same yes- 
terday, to-day, and forever. It is, rather, for those 
local and temporary forms which have become stere- 
otypes of the mind. And the paradoxical thing about 
it is that those particular interpretations which are 
revered as being old are comparative novelties. The 
rampant fundamentalist, for instance, seeking whom 
he may devour, who regards any interpretation of 
Christ more liberal than his own as one of Satan’s 
masterpieces, is not merely so much concerned over 
the triumph of the Spirit of Christ, as over his suc- 
cess in ramming his own dogma down people’s throats. 
He labels as ‘‘the old-time religion” a belief in the 
verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. That particular 
belief is really quite a new-fangled idea, as any stu- 
dent of the history of Scripture knows. 

Way, 


Halford E. Luccock, D.D. 


Many, if not most, of those who declare that the 
old-time religion, which was good enough for Moses, 
for father, for mother, and for Shadrach, Meshach, 
and Abednego, and is consequently good enough for 
them, identify it with the theological interpretations 
and even with the science (there lies the rub!) held 
in certain localities two generations ago. ‘Their at- 
titude of mind is exactly like that of the old lady 
who bitterly opposed the stained-glass windows in 
the new church, saying that she preferred the glass 
“Just as God made it.” Both glass and theology are 
made out of elements supplied by God. But neither 
comes directly from the hand of the Almighty. 

This vociferous cry for the old-time religion is 
an evasion. The chorus, “Give me the old-time re- 
ligion,” is one in which many join. The big business 
man, in disgust and despair over an impertinent, un- 
obsequious, social type of religion which comes into 
his office and asks, ‘“‘What percent do you make on 
your investments?”—‘‘How much of your stock is 
watered?” —““How much do you pay your em- 
ployees?”’ cries passionately, ““Give me the old-time 
religion!” It was much easier to get along with. As 
long as he subscribed to the fund for the relief of 
worn-out preachers, it did not interfere very much 
with his business. To-day many business men’s asso- 
ciations are trying to say with a boycott on those 

128 


The Old-Time Religion 


organizations which dare to advocate putting Chris- 
tianity into practice, ‘“‘The old-time religion is good 
enough for me!” 

To the man looking out on a perplexing world 
with its new scientific understanding and social em- 
phasis, the simple, individualistic, emotional religion 
of two generations ago was ever so much easier to 
get adjusted to. Earth is so much more bother- 
some than heaven! So the man who does not like 
to mix thought with his religion looks back long- 
ingly to the days when it was considered sufficient 
merely to sing about it. 

The unintelligent sigh for yesterday’s religion is 
a repression of to-day’s new insight. It says lazily, 

“The old is better.” Back to grandfather’s world 
and to grandmother’s Bible! Such a blind appeal to 
the near past and the local past strangles every new 
birth of conscience. Nothing could be more destruc- 
tive of a genuine and creative faith than to model 
manners and morals and convictions by the standards 
of yesterday. Some one has said regarding Southern 
novels that too many Southern authors squatted 
about in military cemeteries to write their books. 
A good many religious books have been written in 
military cemeteries! ‘Their chief themes are 


Old, unhappy, far-off things 
And battles long ago. 


bee 


Halford E. Luccock, D.D. 


When we stay in the cemetery too long we catch 
a cold and rigor mortis sets in. It has been well 
pointed out by George Adam Smith that the kingdom 
of God is not obstructed by being blown up, but by 
being sat upon. The most effective way of sitting 
upon the kingdom of God to-day is to begin to sing 
about the old-time religion. 

The emphasis so far has been negative. But I 
would like to make one as emphatically positive as 
I may and plead for the old-time religion as earnestly 
as any camp meeting exhorter might. My only con- 
cern is that it be the genuine article! 

Leap the centuries and you will find two things. 


I 


The old-time religion is the religion of Abraham 
—a religion of intellectual and spiritual daring. The 
“old-time religion” of his day was not good enough 
for Abraham. Not by a thousand miles! He trav- 
eled that far to Canaan to find one good enough. 
The religion which really is old is not a mechanical 
perpetuation of the dead forms of other days. It 
is ploneering for God into new fields and new days. 
Abraham went forth although he did not know where 
he was to go. Had he followed the practice of many 
to-day, he would have answered God’s call to venture 

130 


The Old-Time Religion 


forth by a timorous “No, thank you. Ur suits me all 
right. The old-time religion is good enough for me!” 

He walked west with God, even when that daring 
exploit took him directly in the face of every time- 
honored and revered orthodoxy of his neighbors. 

What a venture it was! Professor F. H. Giddings 
asks an unusual but fascinating question, ‘“‘Why was 
there ever any history at all?” It is well worth think- 
ing about. Why did anything ever happen that made 
events to be recorded? Why was not the record of 
the race simply one long afternoon of cattle grazing, 
in which all history could be summed up in one in- 
glorious word—“ditto”? The answer is that history 
was made by the adventurers. The Order of the 
Sons of Abraham created history. They have made 
the history of religion, beginning with Abraham and 
- going on up through the prophets, on and up until 
there comes that utterly reckless Innovator, Jesus of 
Nazareth, who announces in a perfectly scandalous 
way, ‘Ye have heard it said of old, . . . but I say 
unto you.” Any future history of Christianity worth 
recording will come from the same source—from men 
daring enough to push out into the world of thought 
and life, to adapt Christianity to the needs and 
temper of their time, men who dare to strip the 
husk from the kernel of truth and separate the acci- 
dental from the essential. 

toy 


Halford E. Luccock, D.D. 


General Smuts, in that noble figure of speech de- 
rived from Abraham himself, said, “Humanity has 
struck its tents and is on the march.” It is a tragedy 
if the church is left behind in a walled city. Oh, for 
a baptism of that .old-time religion of Abraham! 
Will Christianity go before this moving column of 
men as a pillar of fire, or will it be left behind like 
a collection of pyramids in ancient Egypt, dedicated 
to the past, peopled by mummies? Will the church 
have intellectual daring enough to make itself and 
its message at home in the new intellectual world 
we live in? Will it have the spiritual daring of Abra- 
ham to respond to the call of God which comes 
through the needs of the world to-day, “‘Get thee 
out’? Get thee out of the familiar and comfortable 
ruts of custom, out of the smug little dogmatisms 
which make void the Word of God through the ac- 
cumulated tradition of unessential trifles! Get thee 
out of the world of petty ecclesiastical red tape and 
into the promised land of great fundamental human 
needs! Maude Royden has graphically pictured the 
failure of negative, conventional traditions to meet 
deep human needs when she tells of a friend of hers 
who was hungering for some explanation of the mean- 
ing of pain and sorrow, and who went to the church 
only to be told that one must not marry his deceased 
wife’s sister! Since the war in America there: has 

132 


The Old-Time Religion 


been a widespread theological reaction depressing in 
the extreme. An ignorant obscurantism, the dead- 
liest enemy which Christianity faces, is trying to 
identify Christianity in the minds of millions of 
people with adherence to wholly impossible and 
grotesque views of science and history. ‘This, of 
course, is only a temporary backwash of the war. 
Already signs appear that it has reached the ebb 
tide, just as the other reactions due to the war in 
economics and politics are being exhausted. An 
overdose of “normalcy” is turning bitter in the 
mouth. 

Let us bring that question back to the individual. 
Can we ourselves keep step with Abraham? Have 
we the “old-time religion” which can cling to the 
great realities of the spiritual life and leave unes- 
sential and irrelevant things behind, as Abraham 
left the traditions of Ur? It is only as we commend 
our faith to the mind of the time that we can ever 
hope to have it command the time. 

Abraham Lincoln has left the church a noble 
watchword: 


The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy 
present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we 
must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, so must we 
think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and 
then we shall save our country. 


133 


Haltordv Es uceock, (ID: 


Consider two concrete examples. There is no 
realm where this daring is so needed as in the crusade 
against war. One would think that the whole force 
of the church would be violently thrown against 
war. But actually nothing of the kind has taken 
place. There are a thousand resolutions passed, a 
million Christmas sermons on the Prince of Peace, 
but to take a positive stand against war—all war— 
still demands the spirit and daring of a martyr. It 
is easy to be against war until a tense situation 
arises. Then the spirit of nationalism throttles the 
spirit of Christ. There is no hope for the world un- 
less the Church of Christ sets its face against war 
like a flint and is willing to sacrifice daringly for the 
goal of a warless world. It has been well suggested 
that we ought to add one more commandment to 
our Decalogue, “Thou shalt not make the next war 
holy.” 

In the realm of church unity the definite call comes 
to get out of the old habitations into the Promised 
Land. Can we move out of our isolated and compla- 
cent sectarianism into genuine working federation? 
There is little hope of the church exerting any com- 
manding influence in national life when it asks the 
world to listen to the clamorous disputes of a de- 
bating society, instead of to the voice of the Chris- 
tian Church. “What army,” asks Macaulay, ‘“‘com- 

134 


The Old-Time Religion 


manded by a debating society every achieved any- 
thing but disgrace?” We have finally learned how 
unity of command on the Western Front during the 
war was brought about. It was not by any far- 
visioned strategy of the leaders, nor by any broad 
wisdom of the government. It was brought about by 
only one thing—the drive of Hindenburg’s army in 
the spring of 1918, which threatened to end the war 
any day with a German victory. That gigantic and 
perilous onslaught did what nothing else could do— 
it swept away national jealousies and welded all the 
fighting forces into one single swinging sword. Per- 
haps that is just what is happening to the church 
before our eyes. Perhaps we ought to be down on 
our knees thanking God for the desperate situation 
of the world to-day if that situation actually brings 
the working unity of all the soldiers of Christ. 


II 


The old-time religion was the religion of Moses— 
a religion of soctal revolution. Perhaps ‘‘revolution” 
is a strong word. So be it. The religion of Moses 
was astrong thing. It was a blazing conviction which 
thundered at the established order in Egypt, in be- 
half of the depressed, defrauded, exploited people, 
the command, “‘Let my people go!” The familiar 


135 


Halford E. Luccock, D.D. 


hymn of praise to the old-time religion has one line 
which declares, “It was good enough for Moses.” 
That is an unmitigated slander. After his vision of 
God in the desert Moses was not content with any 
worn conventionalities. He had learned that the 
will of God meant the release of the toilers, the 
bondsmen. The social gospel is not any new thing. 
It is one of the oldest things in the Bible. It was 
one of the first results of the vision of God which 
came to Moses. And any religion which does not 
have that social vision and throbbing sympathy for 
men at its very center can have any claim to being 
an old-time religion. It is a pale, bloodless modern 
substitute. 

““Give me the old-time religion!” Let the world 
hear from millions of Christian voices the echoes of 
the command of God, ‘“‘Let my people go.” Let it 
reverberate through the United States, now left with- 
out adequate protection for its children against the 
exploitation of those who profit by child labor. Let 
it sound like the crack of doom thundering in the 
ears of Pharaoh in those States where children under 
fourteen years of age are forced to labor for ten to 
twelve hours a day under the shameful permission 
of the State. I believe that adequate protection 
requires a federal amendment prohibiting child labor. 
We are told by lawyers that we ought not to “clutter 

136 


The Old-Time Religion 


up the Constitution” with amendments. But let us 
repeat in high seriousness a remark first made in jest, 
‘“What’s the Constitution between friends?” What 
is the Constitution between God and his friends, the 
children? I would much rather see the Constitution 
cluttered up with a dozen more amendments than 
to see the nation cluttered up with a million under- 
sized, malformed children deprived of their birth- 
right! 

In the whole world of industry we need the old- 
time religion which undertakes to transform an iniq- 
uitous economic order. One of the largest textile 
mills of New England was closed down for months 
by a strike which was brought about by its an- 
nounced intention of reducing wages. The plea of 
the company was that it would not be possible to 
continue to pay the wages and stay in business. 
Yet all the time during the strike it has been paying 
on its stock thirty and forty percent. How long 
will we continue to allow such industrial housekeep- 
ing to go on? 

We must dare to attack the king of the industrial 
order. The king in his purple robes on the throne 
is the profit motive. Society is organized around the 
wrong center—on the motive of acquisition. The 
only remedy that will treat society’s sickness is to 
organize it around the motive of service. And the 


137 


Halford E. Luccock, D.D. 


first step, though not by any means the only one, 
but one in which we can all do something immediate, 
is to show the world a group of men and women who 
are redeemed from the domination of the profit, mo- 
tive in their own lives. 

So we have arrived at the end—where every ser- 
mon should find its journey’s end—at the feet of 
Jesus. The old-time religion is the religion of Jesus 
—a, religion of active, sacrificing love. 

The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy has well caught 
the spirit of that eternal appeal of Jesus: 


Passionately fierce the voice of God is pleading, 
Pleading with men to arm them for the fight. 

See how those hands, majestically bleeding, 
Call us to rout the armies of the night. 

Not to the work of sordid, selfish saving 
Of our own souls to dwell with him on high; 

But to the soldier’s splendid selfless braving 
Eager to fight for righteousness and die. 

Bread of thy body give me for my fighting, 
Give me to drink thy sacred blood for wine, 

While there are wrongs that need me for the righting, 
While there is warfare splendid and divine.* 


1From Poems, by G. A. Studdert Kennedy. Reprinted by permis- 
sion George H. Doran Company. 


138 


THE BLEEDING VINE 


Dr. Hillis has had an extraordinary career as preacher and 
publicist: the facts of his life are almost too familiar to be 
recited, his qualities too well known to need appraisal. Born 
in Iowa sixty-seven years ago, educated at Lake Forest Uni- 
versity and McCormick Theological Seminary, after pastorates 
at Peoria and Evanston, he succeeded to the pulpit of Central 
Church, Chicago: an independent church founded and made 
famous by David Swing—a teacher from whom he had learned 
much, both in literary habit and in the art of making essay- 
sermons. His ministry in Chicago was a dazzling triumph, 
made so by the fascination of his personality, his journalistic 
instinct, his incredible fertility of thought and felicity of style. 
His earliest books, The Investment of Influence and A Man’s 
Value to Society, sold almost like novels; and his Great Books 
as Life Teachers fixed, if it did not introduce, the ‘‘book-ser- 
mon” in American preaching. After four years in Chicago he 
followed Dr. Lyman Abbott in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn— 
the church glorified by the genius of Beecher. Again it was 
a triumph, albeit by a different method, becoming less an es- 
sayist and more a preacher: perhaps the greatest master of 
popular homiletics in his generation. For almost thirty years 
he has published a sermon every week, an amazing feat, requir- 
ing a richness of resource well-nigh unbelievable. Books 
flashed from his pen, like sparks from the anvil of a busy 
smithy, essays, lectures, and at least one novel; but perhaps 
The Influence of Christ in Modern Life, though not so widely 
known, will be longest remembered. In his last book, The 
Great Refusal, he is not only a preacher, but an evangelist, 
using his rich gifts and ripened powers to induce youth to burn 
its bridges and to swear instant fidelity to the convictions of 
the Christian religion. 


— - 2S re 5 Saupe : —_ >. . . 
SS ge ee a ee 


THE BLEEDING VINE* 


NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS, D.D. 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH, BROOKLYN 


“And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when 
she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, 
brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at hts feet 
behind him, weeping and began to wash his feet with tears, 
and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his 
feet and anointed them with the ointment. ... And he said 
to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” Luke 


72393 395/50: 


As an apology for the slenderness of his book of 
reminiscences, the Beloved Disciple, with oriental 
imagery, said, if all the deeds and words of Jesus had 
been preserved the whole world could not contain 
the books that would be written. John means that 
if one sermon on the Mount was recorded, hundreds 
were never reported; that if a few brilliant parables, 
like the story of the Lost Coin, the Lost Sheep, and 
the Lost Son, were written out, thousands of parables 
existed only in the memory of the eager hearers; 
and that if some wonder deeds of mercy were de- 


1From The Great Refusal, by Dr. Hillis. Used by courtesy of 
F, H. Revell Ce, 
141 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


scribed in the Memorabilia of the Master, that other 
thousands were known only to the recipients of His 
kindness. But it could not have been otherwise. 
Consider the fertility of the intellect of Jesus! His 
mind blazed like a star, glowing and sparkling with 
ten thousand brilliant effects. 

His genius was a rich garden, putting forth fruit 
and flowers in every nook and corner, and no 
hand could do more than pluck a few blossoms here 
and there. In August the whole land waves with 
leaves and flowers from Maine to Oregon. Then win- 
ter comes, invading the vineyards and harvest fields. 
Always the north wind leads the armies of destruc- 
tion. Fierce gales flail the boughs of maple and whip 
the branches, and the leaves fall in millions. When 
December comes the forests are bare save where, here 
and there, the oak leaves adhere to their boughs, like 
fragile bronze. Now and then a botanist, chilled by 
the snow, refreshes his memory by looking at the 
leaves he pressed and the flowers he placed between 
the pages of his notebook, but it is a far cry from 
a pressed violet and rose to June bloom and universal 
summer. These slender reminiscences of Luke’s Mas- 
ter represent a few pressed flowers plucked in the 
garden of his memory. The hand of Luke was made 
for one golden bough and not for all beautiful for- 
ests. In trying to interpret that myriad-minded Mas- 

142 


The Bleeding Vine 


ter and His efflorescent genius, we must pass from 
this handful of incidents, this score of parables, to 
the rich gardens where these flowers were plucked 
and to the veins of silver and of gold from which 
this treasure was taken by loving hands. The artist 
may paint a few canvases, but no painter will ever 
be a historian of the full summer. The limitations 
of the human intellect make it certain that the life 
of Christ will never be written. 

Why, then, did Luke and John pass by ninety-nine 
incidents, and record this particular one? Man’s 
first duty is to discover himself, who he is, where 
he came from, what he is here for and whither he 
is going. But there is a larger task and a higher 
knowledge. ‘‘Let not the wise man glory in his 
wisdom, nor the strong man in his strength, nor the 
rich man in his gold, but let him glory in this, that 
he understandeth and knoweth God.” That which 
storms can never reveal, that which earthquakes can 
never proclaim, must be found oyt by the soul. 
Every man paints his own portrait of God, but the 
heart and not the intellect is the artist that limns 
the canvas. The supreme question is, “How does 
the Unseen Being feel toward His children, in the 
hour of their sorrow, suffering, or moral disaster?” 
In the belief that what Jesus was during three years 
in Palestine, the all-helpful God is in all ages and 

143 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


lands, the biographers of Jesus selected out of thou- 
sands of incidents those episodes that would portray 
the heart of God, the gentleness of His strength, the 
mercy of His justice, and the tenderness of His ver- 
dict upon the career of His children. They passed 
by the omniscience of God, the wisdom of Jesus, His 
regency over physical nature, and taking men at 
the point where the heart is broken and the steps 
have wandered, they set forth the way that Jesus bore 
Himself toward the poor pilgrims, lying like bleeding 
vines torn from the wall, like the snowdrops and 
anemone, trampled into the ground by the feet of 
the multitude. 

It is not an accident, therefore, that all four of 
the biographers of Jesus have told in detail the story 
of the feast in the home of Simon. Luke alone re- 
members the parable of the Prodigal Son; Matthew 
recalls the very words of the Sermon on the Mount; 
Mark remembers the last charge given the disciples 
on Olivet, before the Master faded from their sight; 
John loves to linger over that meeting in the upper 
room, when the world-untroubled heart released all 
troubled ones from trouble. But all of the evangelists 
recall every detail of this exquisite incident that took 
place at the banquet in the house of that rich man 
of Bethany. 

The host, one may justifiably conjecture, was the » 


144 


The Bleeding Vine 


leading merchant of his time. His caravans were 
ever on the road between Jerusalem and the cities 
of Egypt on the south, and the cities that clustered 
around Damascus upon the north. Simon dealt in 
wheat, and wool, and silk, in oil and wine, in spices 
from Arabia, and gold from Africa, and diamonds 
from India, and daily he increased in treasure. ‘Tir- 
ing of the city, with its din and tumult, he built a 
rich man’s house in the beautiful suburb of Beth- 
any, and there he entertained his guests. From time 
to time every great city welcomes home the returning 
hero, the ruler or prince, who represents other lands. 
Little by little that first citizen of the Hebrew cap- 
ital, Simon, came to be looked upon as the man who 
would do the honors for his fellow-men. In those 
days Jesus was the popular hero. Multitudes pressed 
and thronged to hear Him speak. The sheer beauty 
of His words cast a spell upon the multitude. He 
wove silken threads of truth and bound men as cap- 
tives to His chariot. In Him the poor found a 
friend. To Him came the downtrodden, knowing 
that He would become a voice for their wrongs. The 
people gave Him their hearts, and thousands would 
have died for their Teacher. And when, at the end 
of an excited day, tired inside and tired out, Jesus 
withdrew to Bethany, this rich man, Simon, with his 
servants, came out to meet and greet the Master, 


145 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


and took Him, as it were by force, and soon servants 
spread the feast. 

When the news ran around that the great Teacher 
was at the rich man’s house, merchants closed their 
shops, farmers left the plows in the field, women and 
children hurried to join the multitudes that filled 
Simon’s house, and crowded his gardens, and over- 
flowed into the street. Great is the power of the 
soldier! Wonderful the influence of the victor in 
battles upon land or sea! Most wonderful the power 
of the statesman, who receives triumphal processions, 
after some victory over oppression! But more won- 
derful still the majesty of goodness, the might of 
love, the regency of a radiant and luminous soul, like 
Jesus, who, all His life long went up and down the 
world doing good unto His fellows. 

The beauty of this incident and its rich meanings 
can only be understood through contrasts. Our 
houses have doors against the chill and rigor of the 
winter. That house of Simon’s was open and built 
for sunshine and the free movement of the currents 
of air. To our feasts come only invited guests; 
ancient feasts were public functions, and the proof 
that the host was poor was that he limited his in- 
vitations, and the proof that Simon was rich was 
that he had abundance and to spare for all who 
crossed the threshold of his house. In that far-off 

146 


The Bleeding Vine 


era, also, tables were unknown. Guesis reclined 
upon couches, and hours were spent in consuming 
an unending series of courses of rich foods. When 
the crowd was densest and there was scarcely room 
to move, and guests pushed and thronged one against 
another, a girl who was scarcely more than a child, 
a girl with a lovely, flower-face, but with robe of 
sackcloth, suddenly dropped upon her knees and put 
her arms above the feet of Jesus and bowed her head 
and burst into a flood of tears. A great silence fell 
upon the guests. Among those guests were men, per- 
chance, who had reason to know that lovely girl. 
Perhaps one of them had broken down all the hedges 
that protect the sweet flowers of the heart in the 
garden of the soul. 

Sometimes the garden gate is left open by the gar- 
dener in a thoughtless mood. Then enter the swine, 
and with tusk and snout root up the soil and grass 
and crush the snowdrop and the anemone and pull 
down the fragrant vines that creep over windows 
_ and walls. Soon the foul beasts finding the bubbling 
spring, wallow in the pure water and turn it into 
mire. They find a garden, they leave bleeding vines 
and bruised flowers. This girl had suffered much at 
the hands of evil men, who had placed in her hand 
the cup of flame, and with lying pledges lured her 
from the paths of peace into tropic jungles, where 

147 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


blooms the scarlet upas flowers, flowers growing in 
fetid jungles, where death and putrefaction have their 
secret lair. But now at last all illusions have dis- 
solved, the mirage has faded, the wreaths on the 
forehead of passion have withered, the lights have 
burned low in the socket, the night has fallen, the 
wind is chill, the storm clouds thicken, the windows 
begin to rattle, the wind sobs and sighs in the chim- 
ney. Voices of remorse threaten, and partly in a 
mood of fear and partly in shame, but most of all 
through sorrow and repentance, in a great, wild or- 
gasm of confession, this sweet girl comes to her- 
self! Her tears fall like rain upon the Master’s feet. 

Oh, these blessed tears! Not the dewdrop is so 
pure! This child feared lest her tears scald His 
person, and loosing her hair she made a veil behind 
which she could hide her face, and with the long 
tresses she wiped His feet, and took that sweet oint- 
ment, very precious, used only for great occasions, 
and broke the treasure-box for the Master. Some- 
times men sweep a half-acre of red roses into one little 
vial, filled with their precious attar; and in those far- 
off days, experts distilled certain precious perfumes, 
and breaking not only the outer alabaster box, but 
that secret box of love, she poured out all the wealth 
of her soul upon the Master. 

Be it remembered that in that era the debtor, in 

148 


The Bleeding Vine 


asking mercy from his creditor, bowed at the feet 
of his benefactor; that the slave and disciple knelt 
at the foot of the master’s couch and in embracing 
the feet surrendered the very life in devotion to the 
lord of the life. And in fulfilment of one of the 
customs understood by all those guests, this woman 
surrendered herself and by the symbolic act made 
herself for evermore the slave to flawless purity and 
perfect justice and the divine love of the Master. 
It is only when we study the scenes and the unfold- 
ing chapters in the life of this young girl that we 
understand the exquisite beauty of an act that has 
made immortal the doer. We know not her name, 
we cannot measure the wealth of her love; the act 
without represented the sentiment of the soul 
within, but unconsciously she has built a monument 
more enduring than marble or bronze. Her life 
opened with a tender pastoral scene that we can re- 
produce even as an expert can replace the amethyst 
torn from its matrix and original setting. One night 
her father returned from the city to his home in 
the country. His daughter, wearing a simple white 
dress, with one flower at her throat, met him at the 
garden gate and clasped both hands about his arm. 
She took him through the flower beds, not knowing 
that she herself was the sweetest flower that had 
bloomed under that sun. What anemones midst the 
149 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


grass! What violets hidden under the leaves! 
There also were orange blossoms and on the same 
boughs the ripened fruit. And there with her own 
hands she had fastened the honeysuckle vine above 
the door and made the entrance to the house to be 
drenched with fragrance. She had spread the simple 
meal in a little summerhouse, and upon the white 
cloth she had placed the cold water from the spring. 
Then she lifted the leaves and showed him the straw- 
berries she had just plucked and the thick cream 
all waiting, and the wheaten loaf, and trying to make 
him forget the toil of the day she drew him to his 
chair and put one arm around his shoulder and laid 
her face against his bronzed cheek and whispered, 
“Oh, father, I am so happy!” And crushing the 
sweet child to his breast the proud father forgot his 
tire and felt himself to be a king, and for one brief 
moment forgot his loneliness for her mother, so long 
since passed away. Wearing the child like a rose 
upon his heart, he bore himself like a king and walked 
the earth, a monarch among those who served. 
Then came dark days. A serpent entered that 
garden. Mephistopheles conspired against young 
Marguerite. With fiendish skill he sought to break 
down the hedge and destroy the buttresses that pro- 
tect virtue Then came a tragedy, oh, how black! 
It was the season for the games and sports and races 


150 


The Bleeding Vine 


of an age all too vulgar. All streets were thronged, 
and all race-tracks. The air was filled with the dust 
of chariots and runners and horsemen. Vendors of 
their wares lifted up shrill voices and cried aloud. 
And moving slowly through the scene went the Mas- 
ter and Lord of life. At last the Carpenter stayed 
His steps before a house of pleasure. Around one 
banqueting table sat a company of wild and reckless 
young men and women. And lo! The central figure, 
toward whose face all these half-drunken young men 
leaned, and to whom they stretched out the ripened 
grapes, the fresh figs, the fragrant sweetmeats, stands 
—that of the young girl of the garden, but with face, 
oh, how changed! And even as Jesus stays His steps 
beside that table she rises in her place, to drink a 
health, and drunken boys empty beakers into her 
overflowing glass, and the purple flood runs down 
and stains the cloth. Stopping before that table 
Jesus looked straight into the girl’s eyes. Oh, those 
all-seeing eyes of Jesus! Eyes that knew all, under- 
stood all, and pitied all! No swords were in those 
eyes. No sparks of fire leaped forth. No arm was 
lifted to smite, but Jesus stood there, a great, dear 
presence, with rebuke of love and pain and disap- 
pointment! The girl stood transfixed, her lips parted, 
in wonder she stretched out that little, right hand, 
holding that enpurpled cup as if to ask, “Who art 
151 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


thou?” Astounded, the revelers rise slowly to their 
feet. In astonishment they gaze first at the queen 
of the feast, and then at the strange Teacher, while 
they ask what these things may mean. Suddenly, 
she drops the goblet that, falling, breaks upon the 
table. She lifts her hands and tears away the scarlet 
flowers twisted in her hair. She strips the pearls from 
her throat and flings them upon the stones beneath. 
Still looking into the Master’s eyes, she pulls off 
the rings and jeweled bracelets, and when the Master 
turns and covers His face with His hand because 
the pain of it was more than He could bear, she 
breathes forth one sobbing moan like a young and 
wounded thing, and sinks unconscious in the chair, 
as the shadows and dark night close around and veil 
the scene! 

And now we behold another scene. Once more 
that young girl is back in her father’s garden. The 
silent looks of that great Teacher had dissolved all 
the illusions of pleasure and sin. What had seemed 
ambrosia became the apples of Sodom, filled with 
ashes and soot. What once was the wine of Bacchus 
and the nectar of Venus, became as the droppings 
of asps and the poison of serpents. Those scarlet 
flowers that her lover had twisted into a wreath be- 
came like coals of fire, blistering her forehead. In 
her long pursuit of the god of pleasure, suddenly, 

152 


The Bleeding Vine 


that whom she had pursued turned, and instead of 
the face of some ideal youth she found she had em- 
braced a toothless hag, and she shrieked aloud. In 
her black despair, she returned to the home, knowing 
she would find it empty because her sin had slain 
her father, and lo, the garden of her youth had come 
up to weeds, as toads and lizards ran across the gar- 
den walks. Fallen the vines from the bare windows! 
Gone all the sweet flowers! Rain had come through 
the roof. Mold was upon the walls. In an abandon 
of grief, she flung her face upon the garden grass 
and with dry sobs, her little fingers clutched the 
earth, while she called on death. Soon she plucked 
away each soft garment and in an old closet found 
sackcloth and black, and she hid herself until the 
night fell. Then, standing in the shadows, she stood 
in the outskirts of the multitude and listened to that 
strange Teacher, and once she drew nearer, and de- 
spite her veil found that the Master had recognized 
her. Suddenly He lifted His hand and, looking 
straight over the heads of other hearers to that place 
where she stood, He sent across the space one word 
for her heart alone: “I am come to seek and save 
that which is lost.’”” Some inner voice whispered: 
“He speaks to you.” 

No mariner on a dark and stormy night upon a 
dangerous coast ever longed for the lighthouse that 


153 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


should lead into the harbor as that young girl had 
longed for the light, and now it had flamed forth. 
At last, the light had come! Shaken with joy, while 
hope and fear wrestled in her heart. she turned and 
fled back to that deserted garden, but all night long 
and all the next day the bells of hope kept ringing, 
and in her dreams she found herself again tossed 
in the dark upon the yeasty sea, and ever across the 
flood came that sweet and mellow bell, ‘I am come 
to seek and save that which is lost,” and when she 
wakened it was as if a night of storm, with hissing 
winds and trembling earth, and sheeted flames and 
forked lightning had all passed, and left the flowers 
safe, and the garden sweet, and lo, the birds were 
singing again in the branches as a great peace stole 
into her heart. 

When the night fell with transports of joy, she 
heard that the Master was at the house of the rich 
merchant, Simon, and entering with the great throng 
and concealing her face behind her robe, she sud- 
denly finds herself beside His couch. Love always 
finds a way. The heart needs no guide and no 
protector. One look into His face told her heart 
that she had not deceived herself. What wonder 
words were those she heard? What did this mean 
that the Master should have asked Simon about the 
two creditors, and now, when the man who owed 


154 





The Bleeding Vine 


a vast debt, and the man whose debt was a trifle 
alike could pay nothing, that the creditor freely for- 
gave them both? And what did this silence mean 
that fell upon the other guests at the question as 
to which debtor loved the benefactor most? And 
then came the answer, “‘I suppose that he loved most 
to whom most was forgiven.” And in that moment 
She bowed her head and in a transport of joy she 
wept aloud as she heard the words, “Thy sins are 
forgiven thee. Go in peace.” Wheresoever this 
story shall be told, it shall be a monument to her. 
Since that far-off time centuries have come and gone, 
but the story comes like a strain of sweet music 
sounding down the long aisles of time, and the fra- 
grance of that box of ointment lingers and now per- 
fumes all literature and lends sweetness to the wide- 
lying world. 

_ The lessons of this exquisite scene in the life of 
the Redeemer are like flowers waiting to be plucked 
in God’s rich garden. How plain it is that there are 
unrevealed treasures hidden under all the wreck of 
sin and shame. History tells us that the fire that 
followed the earthquake in Athens revealed, when 
the ashes were carried away, unsuspected veins of 
silver. But what hidden gold in every heart? In 
God’s sight all men go forward, big with latent 
treasures. It is as if the farmer valued the field for 


155 


Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 


its vegetables and grain, because his is a surface 
view. It is as if Simon had looked upon this sin- 
ning woman’s life as upon a garden filled with weeds, 
thorns, and thistles, while the Lord of the garden, 
with all-seeing eye, pierced through the crust and saw 
beneath the soil with its mire-hidden veins of gold 
and crystals waiting to be cut into diamonds—as if 
all flashing rubies and sapphires were waiting to be 
uncovered. 

Nor must we forget that other lesson, the judg- 
ment of perfect goodness upon the sins of the human 
heart, and the mercy of God’s justice in whispering 
His verdict upon the deeds of the soul. Too often 
we have closed this revelation of the heart of God 
to open the Bible to statements about the wrath of 
an avenging law-giver. Philosophers have invoked 
the support of isolated texts, ‘Our God is a consum- 
ing fire,” “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of 
wisdom,” and so forth, forgetting that Jesus bore 
Himself in such a way as to reveal how God feels 
towards all erring ones who have left the paths of 
truth and virtue. As men go toward genius and 
greatness and the uttermost of holiness, they go to- 
ward gentleness in judgment. The Master and Lord 
of life, with His stainless perfection, was very piti- 
ful. Sinful men would have fain stoned this girl. 
Perfect love, with instant pity, forgave her. Nor 


156 


The Bleeding Vine 


would He even permit her to tell her story. ‘‘Daugh- 
ter’—ah, what a word was that! How long had she 
waited for some one to say the word that used often 
to fall from the lips of her revered father, long since 
dead. And now, that home word, ‘‘Daughter,” that 
bosom pressure word, ‘‘My child,” had fallen from 
the lips of the greatest among the holy, and the 
purest among the great. It was like water to a dying 
wanderer perishing of thirst in the desert. It was 
like music falling from the battlements of Heaven. 
What wonder words were these that fell upon her 
bleeding and broken heart: “Thy sins are forgiven 
thee, go in peace.” In that moment the flare of 
lightning passed away, the black cloud on the horizon 
dissolved, the last echo of the midnight storm and 
tornado was hushed, the sun shone forth and in her 
vision she saw her father and mother coming across 
the grass in the souls’ summerland, to take her into 
their arms and whisper welcome and lead her up 
unto the throne of mercy, not marble, the throne of 
love, and not law. And when the Master spoke the 
word ‘‘Forgiven” every wound was healed as she 
entered her Paradise, and her hot desert became an 
Eden garden. 


17, 





THE FLAMING SWORD 


Dr. Bushnell was born at Old Saybrook, Conn., in 1858; 
graduated from Yale University in the class of 1880; and after 
four years spent as Hooker fellow for special critical study, he 
entered the Congregational ministry in 1884. In 1888 he 
transferred to the Presbyterian fellowship, and, following a 
ministry at Rye, New York, was minister of Phillips and 
Madison Avenue Churches, New York City. Since 1900 he 
enjoyed a distinguished and fruitful ministry in the West- 
minster Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis. His volume of 
sermons, Summit Views, is aptly named and richly rewarding. 
A quiet ministry in a noisy age, busy about his work, but watch- 
ful of the trend of the times, he sees that the Garden of God 
is next door, but we are shut out by a stupidity which we think 
clever. As Arnold said of Goethe, he diagnoses the sick haste 
of the age, putting his finger on the secret and source of the 
wild restlessness which afflicts us like a fever. Physically it is 
the most comfortable age in history; spiritually one of the most 
uncomfortable—all because man thinks he knows more than 
God, and that he can make laws to suit himself. And the 
Flaming Sword flashes at the Garden Gate, as it wiil flash again 
at the Gate of Judgment! 


THE FLAMING SWORD 


JOHN EDWARD BUSHNELL, D.D. 
WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, MINNEAPOLIS 


“So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the 
garden of Eden, cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned 
every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’ Genesis 3: 24. 


Viewed in the literal and material form these 
words baffle our imagination. Taken as a symbol 
of great historic facts they are almost overpowering 
in their conception. We do not know the way in 
which the first people of the race, in their simplicity, 
lived before they awakened to the ambitions and 
rivalries which came with advancing civilization. It 
was the childhood of the race in every sense of the 
word and, therefore, its state of mind was to that 
extent the happiness of immaturity. In the course of 
events life became more complex and troubled. 

Whatever they enjoyed then and however much 
was lost through progress, we know that we are not 
in Eden at present. This is what concerns us, and 
also the question as to whether there is one which 
is awaiting us. 

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John Edward Bushnell, D.D. 


I 


What, then, is Eden to the modern mind, and 
where is it? If Jesus said: “The Kingdom of Heaven 
is within you,” perhaps He also would have said the 
same of Eden. Surely there must be such a garden 
in our own hearts before any earthly garden, how- 
ever beautiful, could give us full happiness. There 
always has been in the mind of man some faint vision 
at least of a more perfect life in this world. 

It might seem almost as though we had by lineal 
descent inherited from our first parents some inborn 
idea of a life as sweet and happy as untroubled child- 
hood, some garden in the East with fruits and flowers 
and friendly skies. Eden may be said to be in the 
blood of every man, we mean by that at least a dream 
of something better, a vision of a world that comes 
at last into its own, something unattained that has 
been lost out of our life which Providence designed 
for us. 

In the darkest times peoples have hung their harps 
on the willows and wept, like the Jews of old sepa- 
rated from the homeland, but ever hoping and ex- 
pecting that some day they would return. It takes — 
the form of unrest, even under the best conditions. | 
Things are never so good but that they ought to be 
better. It takes the form, among the young, of what 

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The Flaming Sword 


we express by that old word, the ideal. Man is ever 
seeking, but never finds the pot of gold at the end 
of the rainbow. ‘Man never is, but always to be 
blessed.”” His best work seems to him but a step 
toward the perfect. 

Somewhere in the dim distance life on earth will 
be happier. There will be justice in place of wrong. 
Instead of murderous competition shall be codpera- 
tion. Instead of national animosities and hatreds 
shall be mutual respect and peace. Therefore the 
efforts made to bring it to peace, the lives sacrificed, 
the heroisms displayed, the prayers offered. There- 
fore the army of good men and women who have 
gone not with swords but with the Gospel to preach 
love and truth in God. So they cherish the angels’ 
Christmas song of peace on earth, goodwill to men. 
It is deep down in the heart of the race. 

At present the ideal seems further away than ever 
in some respects, and yet there are more people 
working, praying, and giving up their very lives to 
make it real again, to bring the world back to Eden, 
than ever before in the history of man. Somewhere, 
too, in the individual heart as well as in that of na- 
tions there is unrest, failure to find exactly that sat- 
isfaction in life which it gropes after. The East says: 
“Tt is not in me,” and the West echoes back: “It is 
not in me.” 


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John Edward Bushnell, D.D. 


Eden, then, is a state of mind. It is like a fair, 
beautiful garden, for which the world is groping now, 
for which human souls are yearning, ‘“‘a peace that 
passeth understanding,” a life rich and full and free. 


II 


Eden lost. How? We may question the historical 
literalness of the ancient story of Genesis. None can 
dispute its Divine significance. Of each age it chal- 
lenges interpretation. 

We all have lost in our own lives our little garden. 
We lived in it for a while. We look back to it some- 
times with longing. ‘‘Heaven lies about us in our 
infancy.” 

And as with persons so with peoples. Men, as 
they come to a fuller knowledge, their minds ex- 
panding and discovering, have lost simplicity out of 
life. They no longer are children, but straining, 
eager, pushing men, with more to tempt, more to 
appeal to the senses. The more there is to obtain, 
the greater grows the rivalry. When there was not 
much to buy there was not so much lust to get 
money. When there is much to be had when one 
can pay the price, the more fierce grows the struggle 
to possess the price. 

Gandhi of India is trying to shut out the Western 

1604 


The Flaming Sword 


World and its civilization, its science and its inven- 
tions, and lead his people back to the primitive state 
as he sees how terrible this mechanical world of ours 
has become in its thirstings and fightings, its tramp- 
lings upon the weaker in order that the strong may 
climb. Men have sacrificed the real for the unreal, 
the substance for the shadow. They have thought 
that Eden lay yonder. God placed it elsewhere. 

As education has advanced, as men have eaten of 
the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they have 
enlarged their life and brought into subjection many 
of the material forces. Yet with all the benefits and 
possibilities has come much that has drawn men away 
from the Eden of their dreams. Pride has come in, 
with doubts and unbelief in the things unseen and 
eternal. In these days, instead of leading us on into 
the infinite and up to God, civilization is very largely 
drawing in its lines and actually limiting men’s 
visions and confining their thoughts to the material. 
Eden is not there. 

So men, finding themselves in this world, enriched 
in knowledge, adorned by the products of its sciences, 
comfortable and beautiful in its homes and their fur- 
nishings, still have the haunting dream. Something 
has been unachieved which the race innately has felt 
to be in the great designs of creation. 

In the allurements of life, in the haste to possess 


165 


John Edward Bushnell, D.D. 


and the greed to enjoy, in “the lust of the flesh, and 
the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,” life be- 
comes fearfully, painfully sordid and selfish. The 
very things that should be blessings become foes. 
The things that ought to make people grateful make 
them unthankful. The more the world brings to us 
the more difficult to restrain the human heart from 
vanity and pride and desire for more. Thence come 
wars. 

There never has been a time, since Cain killed his 
brother, that the human race has stopped fighting. 
And as one authority said: ‘‘The nineteenth century 
in that respect was the worst of all.” We can see 
that this is so for, with its great equipments, its or- 
ganized forces and the lust for empire, the greed 
and pride of life, that one great century was red and 
the fury ceased not until it took possession of the 
twentieth century and wrought the greatest havoc 
and reached its very climax of woe, so awful that 
the only redeeming hope that is left out of it all is 
that the very horror of it may mean the death of 
all its brood. 

But do we not have in our world to-day the con- 
flict of those other passions which are as destructive 
in their way as those displayed upon the battlefield? 
Their consequences are in some respects more piti- 
able. That is the world we live in, and Eden never 


166 


The Flaming Sword 


seemed farther away from men’s vision and faith 
than in this most enlightened, most scientific, most 
learned, and richest age in all human history. And 
what has brought it to pass but man seeking his 
own and caring not for his brother and unheeding 
the Christ of Calvary. 

But yet there is an Eden. Somehow, in all the 
dance of circumstances, in all the rage for pleasure, 
in all the sway of the things that are sensual and 
voluptuous, in the midst of the mad rush for wealth 
and excitement and greed for pleasure, in the de- 
cline even of religion itself, there still remains in the 
human heart a belief that this world is not to be 
given over to the things that destroy, that heroism 
is not a thing of the past, that there must arise a 
conquering desire for a world of more kindly senti- 
ments, where men and women who speak different 
tongues may be able to live together and learn to 
enjoy one another, that righteousness will come to 
its own, that those who stand for the right and dare 
to speak the truth will be heard. The pledge is in 
the sacrifice of Love Divine upon the cross. 


Tit 


What, then, is the flaming sword? As it turns in 
the hand of the angel it tells us that the garden has 
167 


John Edward Bushnell, D.D. 


not been destroyed, that it is still there while man 
wanders afield and seeks outside its gates the object 
of his desires. This very thing that excludes men 
also shows them the way home. If we have lost 
anything of value we are self-banished. We did not 
have to go, but we defied the everlasting laws that 
lie at the heart of things. 

Men are not happy because they have violated 
the principles on which happiness depends. It takes 
the world a long time to learn that it cannot con- 
struct rules of its own to take the place of those that 
flash from that burning steel. There are certain 
things that are right and right obeyed is the secret 
of wisdom. Man cannot change the order, annul 
the decrees that are eternal, and make unrighteous- 
ness profitable. He cannot make the wages of sin 
into currency to buy happiness. 

We may make as many statutes as we please, — 
decreeing the rules that shall bring health to the 
body, that henceforth carbolic acid shall be an inno- 
cent beverage for the thirsty to drink, that God’s 
commands are abrogated, that the lie shall be as 
productive of good as the truth, that virtue and 
integrity are not to be regarded as essential to na- 
tional welfare, that we may say both “‘Good Lord” 
and “Good Devil.” Referendum may be made to 
the people to suspend the Ten Commandments or 


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The Flaming Sword 


the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. But the 
flashing sword is at the gate. You cannot enter in 
defiance of those things that never change, for God 
is God and truth is truth, sin is sin and hatred is 
not the same as love. 

The wise physician is sitting down with a youth 
to tell him how to possess the strongest body and 
fit himself physically for the labors that are before 
him. He holds up to him sensibly certain general 
principles which govern health and the preservation 
of life. He says to him in effect: ‘‘This is the gate 
of your Eden, a rounded, perfect manhood. Obey 
these laws and you enter. Defy them and you stay 
without.” 

The father is bidding farewell to his boy who is 
going into the great world out of his sight. He 
has learned some things by experience as well as 
from the books. He has his ideals for his son. He 
covets for him a splendid success, nobly won, with 
the esteem and affection of his fellow men. He ex- 
alts before his vision the things of value, the things 
that make for character, for which he must make 
sacrifices at times in order to obtain them. Through 
that gate is the Eden of a happy, satisfied life, 
blessed and a blessing to the world. 

The business house has its rules for successful 
industry. Law guards the gate also of the Eden of 

169 


John Edward Bushnell, D.D. 


the commercial world, that of industry, obligation, 
patience, and self-restraint which sacrifices the things 
that injure one’s capacity for work, that becloud one’s 
mind for thinking, that make one less capable men- 
tally of his best. 

There is a flaming sword in whatever direction you 
look for Eden. It is for us to interpret the shining 
symbol. 


IV 


The sheathing Day! How long will the world 
stay outside the beautiful garden of its quest, con- 
tent to be restless, warring, hating, sinning, substi- 
tuting the laws of men for those of God, thinking 
that it can purchase peace? 

Let us make no mistake about it. Happiness is 
found only when the eternal truths are held in rev- 
erence and the everlasting laws obeyed. We may 
think that we can suspend the rule that what one 
sows that shall he reap. But the sword is at the 
gate. The farmer must obey the laws that govern 
the land or accept an empty granary. 

We cannot but feel to-day that all we have, all 
we have learned, all that our labors have brought 
to us, have failed to bring us that which we in our 


170 


Ee ee ee eee iene 


The Flaming Sword 


heart of hearts know to be what we have a right 
to seek for and demand. Life should be happier, 
more comfortable. Toil should be made to become 
pleasanter as well as more profitable. Men should 
live together in human society without this constant 
irritation and anger. The forces of evil should not 
have such sway and brazenly defy virtue and honor. 

Is it not written: ‘‘For the earnest expectation of 
the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of 
God”? That day lies beyond the unrest, the loss of 
faith, the widespread despair, the prevalence of evil 
that destroys, that robs youth of virtue and life. 
of strength. To bring that day Christ gave His life. 

Not until the heart is humbled and is willing to 
bow to the great truths which, because they have 
been long defied, have long afflicted them by their 
penalties, can men reach the haven of their hopes. 
When earth’s people shall recognize the law of right- 
eousness and of love, then shall the tumult cease as 
well as the jarrings and the crimes and the things 
that shame. There is a gate by which every na- 
tion, every town, every soul must pass if it would 
find that self-fulfilment which it has the right and 
duty to claim, that sublime consummation which is 
written in the beneficent plan and glows in the boun- 
tiful promises of our Father God. 


171 


John Edward Bushnell, D.D. 


Yet there may be no sheathing Day for Eden’s 
sword. Rather by faith we may see it now delivered 
into the wounded hand of One returning from great 
wars, victorious. No longer does it tell of exile from 
true life, but it beckons homeward where through 
the gate Christ marshals back His own. 


172 





ON LOVING AN ENEMY 


A native of Nova Scotia—born at New Ross in 1874— 
trained at University of King’s College, Windsor, with post- 
graduate work in philosophy at Columbia University, Dr. 
Norwood was ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal 
Church in 1898. His first work was that of a missionary at 
Neil’s Harbor, Cape Breton: then a curate of St. Luke’s 
Church, Hubbards; an assistant rector of Trinity Church, Mon- 
treal; rector of Memorial Church, London, Ontario; whence 
he came to St. Paul’s Church, Overbrook, Philadelphia, where 
his ministry has grown and gathered power since 1917. Dr. 
Norwood is a preacher of the order of poets, not a poet-preacher 
who weaves wreaths of flowery emptiness, but a seer to whom 
the multi-colored world is a Divine parable, aglow with light 
and loveliness and moving to moral and spiritual ends. His 
angle of insight, his method of approach to truth, his fresh, 
joyous, quick-darting fancy, betray the poet-soul revealing 
itself now in sermons that search like a white flame, now in 
books of poems like His Lady of the Sonnets and The Piper 
and the Reed, now in a drama like The Witch of Endor. The 
present sermon is preaching of a very real kind, and only a 
poet could thus link the back of God seen by Moses in dim 
vision with the bent back of the happy Burden-Bearer, in 
whom God became man that man may become godlike. One 
feels in the sermon a glow of that incommunicable grace which 
invests the man and his preaching with the lure of a unique 
and compelling charm. 


ON LOVING AN ENEMY 


ROBERT NORWOOD, D.D. 
ST. PAUL’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, OVERBROOK, PHILADELPHIA 


“And I shall take away mine hand, and thou shali see my 
back parts: but my face shall not be seen.” Exodus 33: 23. 

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that 
curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and 
persecute you.” Matt. 5: 44. 


In the portions of scripture read this morning the 
picture of God is given. It is the same picture. It 
is the picture of the goodness of God in human action. 
How would God act if He came down to earth as a 
man? Would He talk about His omnipotence? 
Would He force people to be conscious that He was 
the mighty God of the universe? 

“Ves, that is what He would do,” say a great num- 
ber of people. ‘‘We would know He was God if 
He came down with His omnipotence; but if He did 
not, how would we recognize Him? He would have 
to show us His face—the face of a king, not the 
back of a servant. We should expect Him to walk 
on water; if he did not, we would not believe He was 
God. We should expect Him to turn water into 
wine; if He did not, we would not believe He was 

175 


Robert Norwood, D.D. 


God. We should expect Him to use thunder and 
lightning on His enemies, calling down from the 
heaven, which He had left for our sakes, the fires of 
His wrath and terrible judgments.” 

How would God act if He came down to earth? 
There are people who say that He would act in a 
very beautiful and simple way. He would cause 
His goodness to pass before our faces. He would 
not frighten us with His splendor, but woo us with 
His gentle love and tenderness. He would come, 
not as a king, but as a servant. He would not show 
the face of a king. He would show a back for bear- 
ing burdens. He would not bother at all about ad- 
vertising Himself with signs and wonders. He would 
rely only on His goodness, because the goodness of 
God is the allness of God. If you could take away 
the goodness of God from His omnipotence, the re- 
sult would be the devil. It is goodness with omnipo- 
tence that makes omnipotence divine. He would 
cause His goodness to pass before us. 

We have been listening to the words of a man 
whom the ages have regarded, and still regard, as 
the goodness of God, believing that God at last, in 
the fullness of time, came to earth in the person of 
Jesus. Of Him many stories have been written, many 
things said—things that are not always consistent 
and, therefore, cannot be held as equally true. Some 

176 


On Loving an Enemy 


of these stories indicate average notions of greatness 
which are fundamentally wrong because so many 
people hold that power is greatness. To such the 
thought of goodness as greatness is absurd. People 
like these are seekers of the sign—so described by 
the Master when he called them ‘‘an adulterous gen- 
eration.” It is possible that, at bottom, the fall of 
Judas was due to this vulgarity of insisting on om- 
nipotence. 

This attitude of mind towards omnipotence is re- 
vealed in the schoolboy’s muscular demonstrations— 
the cutting of a cart-wheel before his sweetheart. 
We accept this thing in a schoolboy because he has 
not yet come to the age of putting away childish 
things, but it is amazing that, at this hour, so many 
sons of God express this mind in their interpretation 
of the New Testament. They must have every mira- 
cle literally true because, if you take away the mira- 
cles—the signs of power—you strike at the goodness 
of Christ; as though goodness were revealed in 
power. 

Not in this spirit was the Master described by 
Matthew, quoting Isaiah: ““Behoid my servant, whom 
I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well 
pleased: I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall 
shew judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not strive, 
nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice in the 


177 


Robert Norwood, D.D. 


streets. A bruised reed shall he not break, and 
smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth 
judgment unto victory.” 

As for the Master’s opinion of those who stress 
omnipotence as the evidence for God, the Gospels 
abound with his words of rebuke. He has described 
these seekers in his ‘‘Verily I say unto you, They have 
their reward.” They get what they are after. They 
get notice. They want to attract attention to them- 
selves because they are selfish and vain and small, 
and they assume that God, also, wants to attract 
attention to Himself by stunts, stressing omnipotence 
instead of love. 

It is fair to consider that the task of a disciple is 
not easy. It was not easy for Moses, who evidently 
thought more of rocking mountains and flaming skies 
than he did of God’s goodness. It took him a long 
while to learn to be content with the vision of God’s 
back, to get along without the vision of God’s face. 
One day he came to see that only as a man is identi- 
fied with God’s back can he see God’s face. The 
way to the knowledge of God’s power is along the 
path of God’s goodness. 

That is how the Master prepared his disciples for 
their ministry, and it is still his method of preparing 
his friends for their work in this world, for the words 
that he spoke to his first group of disciples apply to 

178 


On Loving an Enemy 


every group. A disciple is a man chosen by God 
to represent God. That is all there is to Christianity. 
Of course there are the subsidiary things—things to 
be added when the essential lesson has been learned. 
When the goodness of God has been learned, the 
power of God will come as a matter of course; but 
seek first His goodness. 

It came upon me like a beam of sunlight in a dark 
room, as we said the General Confession, that the 
knowledge of the goodness of God is exactly what 
the Church has wanted us to get when we are asked 
to say, ‘“‘We bless thee for our creation, preservation, 
and all the blessings of this life.”” We do bless God 
for creation, because Christ teaches us that God has 
created us to manifest Him, that we may be the 
vehicles of His splendor, partners with Him in the 
manifestation of what He wants to give everybody. 
“We thank Thee for the wonderful destiny Thou 
hast chosen for us. We thank Thee that Thou hast 
called us to be Thy ministers and stewards. Where- 
ever we are, this is our highest role. Thou hast 
chosen us to be Thy voice, Thy hands, Thy feet. 
Thou hast chosen us to be Thy back. But, above 
all, we thank Thee for Thine inestimable love in the 
redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ. 
And, we beseech Thee, give us that due sense of all 
thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly 

179 


Robert Norwood, D.D. 


thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only 
with our lips, but in our lives.” 

Christianity is not a creed, but a life. The creed 
is a beautiful thing—a decoration, if you will. It is 
a jewel in our life, but life is the crown. Christianity 
is a life. It is based on the belief that God can be- 
come man. A disciple of Jesus Christ is a man in- 
spired by the example of his master—a man who car- 
ries on and says, “‘God has become man in me. God 
is using me as a veil in order that, as it is parted by 
my life here on this planet, people may see His good- 
ness.” 

Oh, if we in our squabbles could only see that! 
If we could only see that the right thing is for every- 
body to be loyal to the life and let the rest go. 

What is divinity but Jesus? What is divinity-but 
the goodness of God? Do you know of any other 
kind of divinity? Did I not say, if you separate 
goodness from omnipotence, you have the devil? 
The essence of your divinity and mine is that same 
kind of goodness, and the Master is our authority. 
Be perfect. You won’t be in a minute. There will 
be barriers ahead of you, disciplines and tests and 
challenges. Go on. There are things you can do. 
Begin to practise. Love your enemy. The goodness 
of God will go out'into the world through your name 
if you become one who never answers back, never 


180 


On Loving an Enemy 


gossips, 1s never vindictive. Arise and try it. The 
goodness of God will pass by in your manhood, if, 
instead of being critical of your neighbor, you become 
the gentle man, the burden-bearer. 

There are many things for us to acquire on this 
planet. Some may acquire faith, some wealth, some 
a life of ease and redemption from toil; but there is 
only one thing for a Christian to acquire—a fact that 
is summed up in a little verse I found years ago in 
an old album of a country home in Nova Scotia. I 
think it ran like this: 


When you were born a helpless child, 
You only cried while others smiled. 
So live that when you come to die, 
You then may smile while others cry. 


To be remembered as a tender presence, as always 
devoted, always understanding, always kind; to be 
remembered as the healer, the helper, the one who 
was hospitable, the one whose hand was always on 
the gate of opportunity for friendship: surely that 
is the highest reward. This is in store for those 
who have listened to the Master in the Sermon on 
the Mount: “It was said to you of old time, Love 
your friends and hate your enemies; but I say unto 
you, if you would let the goodness of God through 
into the world by your body, which is the means of 

181 


Robert Norwood, D.D. 


your grace, then learn to be the lover, the forgiver, 
the compassionate one. As your Father in heaven is 
revealed in me, so let your Father in heaven be 
revealed in you.” 

“But,” you say, “it cannot be done.” 

T answer, ‘“‘It was done once.” 

“Ah,” you say, “that was different.” 

I answer, ‘‘Wherein is the difference? Certainly 
not in the mind of him who said, ‘Follow me’... 
‘All power is given unto me’... ‘As my Father 
hath sent me, even so send I you.’” It was done 
once, and it can be done again. You can do it. 
How? Begin at the narrow gate. What is that? I 
think it is in loving our enemies. ‘That is about the 
hardest thing one can do who would cause the good- 
ness of God, through himself, to pass before a world. 
Face that fact. It is hard—hard to the point of 
Gethsemane and crucifixion, so hard that failures are 
inevitable among those who begin. Such a beginning 
is true conversion, for “every one that loveth is born 
of God.” To look at the goodness of God; to be 
content with it and let His omnipotence go—His 
baffling, mysterious omnipotence; to be content with 
the life of love and service and the vision of the 
back instead of the vision of the face; to cease to 
be a wrangler, a backbiter, an arguer about the 
nature of God—whether He does this or whether He 

182 





On Loving an Enemy 


does that; and to love without limit as the Master 
loved: surely this is conversion. This is the begin- 
ning of the path through the little gate that leads 
unto life. 

Do you recall, my comrades, the tender thought 
that Browning places in the heart of Karshish, who 
is concluding his letter that tells of how he met 
Lazarus and, through that, was led to see the good- 
ness of God in the Galilean? Browning must have 
been thinking just as we have been thinking to- 
gether this morning; but surely his mind is as our 
mind when he distinguishes between power and love 
and puts the emphasis where it belongs and where 
the Master places it—where we must place it—where 
Moses placed it when God caused all His goodness 
to pass before him and left His omnipotence out: 


The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 

So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too— 

So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 

Thou hast no power nor may’st conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 

And thou must love me who have died for thee!” 


And now we are come to this moment of consecra- 
tion, to the life of the goodness of God. Let us bow 
our heads and say, ““Teach us to live as Thou didst 


183 


Robert Norwood, D.D. 


live, O generous Love that was made man, manifest- 
ing Thy goodness in a cross and its redeeming power. 
Speak to us as, on a day of old, Thou didst speak 
to Thy first disciples, and give us again to understand 
Thy words: ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy; 
but I say unto you, Love your enemies .. . that 
ye may be the children of your Father, that you may 
be God in human form, as I, your Master, am God 
in human form.’ ” 

Let us pray: 

In humility and yet in eagerness for all tests we 
come to Thee, O Master of men, who didst make 
the goodness of our Father pass by in the form of 
the back that bore a cross. We come to Thee be- 
cause Thou didst live the life, because we want to 
live it, knowing that Thy grace is sufficient for us 
and Thy strength is made perfect in our groping, 
stumbling efforts. We ask for just this one thing 
this morning—that we may learn how to be kind. 
It is easy to be kind to those who are kind to us. 
That is nothing. Even the Pharisees are kind like 
that. But it is only Thy power and grace revealed 
in mankind, when some one is kind to those who 
are unkind to him. It seems hard, Master, but Thou 
didst do it. It is not enough to say ‘‘Master, mas- 
ter.” We must be the Master, and be disgusted 

184 





On Loving an Enemy 


with ourselves if we are not. We are such hypocrites. 
We are so ostentatious and so proud, Master. Place 
Thy hand upon our heads—our poor, bowed, humble 
heads, and forgive us our hypocrisy. Send us forth 
for one week of lovingkindness. Amen. 


185 


THE RADICALISM OF JESUS 


Dr. McKeehan is one of the outstanding younger men of 
the American pulpit—the youngest included in this volume— 
who is rapidly making his way into the front rank. Born on 
a farm near Newport, Pa., in 1897, after attending schools and 
academies in his county, he studied with a relative of his 
family, Prof. J. P. Mahaffy, Provost of the University of 
Dublin. Subsequently he studied at Valparaiso University, and 
after graduating from the Theological Seminary of the Re- 
formed Church, he became pastor of St. Paul’s Reformed 
Church, Dallastown, Pa. Last year he preached in a number 
of English pulpits and at Oxford University, on his way as 
delegate of the Reformed Church to the World Council of 
Churches at Zurich. He is editor of a volume of Great Modern 
Sermons, and author of The Patrimony of Life—sermons 
reminiscent of the Gunsaulus-Hillis type of preaching, but with 
an accent and emphasis uniquely his own. A young man in 
the morning of his career, he is a spokesman of one of the first 
Christian communions in America to emphasize a Christo- 
centric faith, at once a focus of fellowship and a prophecy of 
unity. 





THE RADICALISM OF JESUS 


HOBART D. McKEEHAN, S.T.M. 
ST. PAUL’S REFORMED CHURCH, DALLASTOWN, PA. 


“Ve have heard it said of old time, but I say unto you.” 
Mating 122. 

“From within, out of the hearts of men, evil thoughts pro- 
ceed.” Mark 7: 21. 


Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest of all Radicals, 
and His spirit is the most radical force in human 
history. By both precept and example he went to 
the very root of the moral and spiritual life. Press- 
ing beneath the apparent, he unveiled the actual. 
Passing beyond the symptoms of either health or dis- 
ease, righteousness or sin, He revealed the primal 
causes. His claim as Teacher and Leader in individ- 
ual and social life was asserted upon the ruling 
motives which actuate the hearts of men and women. 
Like all true radicals Jesus went to the source and 
origin of every problem. And like all true radicals 
He had no fear of the triumph and implications of 
ultimate Truth. The more one studies the life and 
teachings of Jesus with a serious and unprejudiced 


1389 


Hobart D. McKeehan, S.T.M. 


mind the greater grows his conviction of the unpar- 
alleled radicalism of the Master. 

And yet the radicalism of Jesus is profoundly 
unique. In searching out the hidden springs of 
thought and conduct, in probing after all primal 
causes either of light or of darkness, Jesus is always 
dealing with persons. Other teachers have declared 
that the weal and woe, the joy and pain of indi- 
vidual and communal life is bound up with educa- 
tional, political, or economic régimes. But Jesus de- 
clared that they were determined not by circum- 
stances, but by men. And this uniqueness of Christ 
stands in bold relief when one considers Him in com- 
parison with any other teacher. 

“We study Aristotle,” says Carnegie Simpson, 
“and are intellectually edified thereby; we study 
Jesus and are, in the profoundest way, spiritually dis- 
turbed. When we had thought intellectually to ex- 
amine Him, we find He is spiritually examining us.” 
This is the uniqueness of His radical disposition and 
proposals. A man may indeed study Jesus with intel- 
lectual impartiality—but no man can study Jesus se- 
riously and do so with moral neutrality! He must 
agree or disagree with His proposals. He must accept 
or reject His spirit. Ultimately there is no neutral 
ground. 

Perhaps one can find the radicalism of Jesus set 


190 





The Radicalism of Jesus 


forth in no more striking fashion than by comparing 
His teaching with that of His Hebrew predecessors 
and contemporaries. Reverencing the past, loving 
the Law, ever listening to the wise ancestral voices 
of prophets, priests, poets, and kings, Jesus was by 
no means disrespectful toward either the Church or 
the State. In the truest possible sense He came to 
fulfil rather than to destroy. Nevertheless, He 
poured new meaning into old thought-forms, new 
wine into old wine skins. And because He studied 
the roots rather than the branches, because He dealt 
with motives rather than with actions, with causes 
rather than with effects, and insisted upon a trans- 
formed rather than a conformed life-—because of 
this, I say, the proposals of Jesus constitute the most 
radical body of teaching in the history of the world. 
I am not thinking, however, of the doctrines and 
dogmas which have long been promulgated as the 
major portion of the teaching of the Church. I 
am not suggesting that there is anything unusually 
radical in much that has been taught concerning 
Jesus. But who will question the radicalism of Jesus 
Himself—of His teaching and example among men! 
Never man so spake—never did man so live! And 
because no man has ever spoken like Jesus and none 
have lived like Him, it is perhaps not inexplicable 
why so few have ever understood Him! His own age 
19] 


Hobart D. McKeehan, 8.T.M. 


did not understand Him. His own family did not 
understand Him! He was difficult to understand 
because His attitude toward life was so radical, His 
attitude toward personalities so innovating, His atti- 
tude toward tradition and orthodoxy so skeptical, 
His cardinal propositions of doctrine so revolution- 
ary, and yet His communion with His Father so un- 
clouded and unbroken as to make Him forever 
solitary and unique in all spiritual matters. Is it 
any wonder that Nazareth did not understand Jesus? 
Or that the representatives of organized business, 
organized religion, and organized politics united to 
crucify Him at Jerusalem when He was at least par- 
tially understood! And is it not plain that the major 
portion of the church does not seem to understand 
Him, even to-day? 

Consider but a few fragments of what was and is 
involved in the attitude and teaching of Jesus. His 
attitude toward life itself was radical! He was an 
optimist. He was a Man of joy. The New Testa- 
ment itself is the most joyous and optimistic book 
in the world. It begins with a glowing star and 
the song of Angels. It ends with a shout of triumph! 
Doubtless much which controversialists have read 
into the New Testament and much which the dogma- 
tists have woven around the New Testament is not 
joyous and optimistic. But I am not concerned with 


192 


The Radicalism of Jesus 


these things. I am thinking of the Evangel itself. 
And I am certain that Jesus, as the author of the 
Evangel, was a lover of life. He drew no sharp dis- 
tinction between earth and heaven. He believed in 
life—full, free, creative, and abundant life! And 
the New Testament is not the biography of a recluse, 
but of a virile Man among men. As Principal Jacks 
rightly says: “‘Christianity fails through the loss of 
its radiant energy. There is that in the Gospel 
which is akin to the song of the skylark and the bab- 
bling of brooks!” 

Consider also how radical was Jesus’ attitude to- 
ward persons. He looked upon men and women as 
an end in themselves and not as means to an end. 
He saw in all ranks and conditions of society the 
promise of a divine brotherhood and sonship. Emer- 
son has said that Christ alone in history rightly es- 
timated the greatness of man. Man’s success or 
failure, said Jesus, is not determined by the place 
and conditions into which he happens to be born, 
but by the choices which he must constantly make. 

Aideen, in that strange and fascinating novel, The 
Unpardonable Sin, presents Jesus’ point of view, 
saying: ‘What you have been, you have been. What 
you have done, you have done. But what you are 
is what you choose to be. No spirit can take away 
your power over yourself. The present is greater 


193 


Hobart D. McKeehan, S.T.M. 


than the past and the future greater than the 
present.” 

Against the arbitrary castes of sex or station in 
society and the cynicism either of wealth or of learn- 
ing, Jesus arose in deep revolt. The Greeks were 
typical of the Ancient world when they spoke of 
women as being the result of nature’s failure to make 
men, and of artisans and mechanics as being incapable 
of any virtue. And into such a world of thought and 
outlook came Jesus, announcing not only that per- 
sons are of equal worth before God, but that per- 
sonality is the crowning triumph of God’s creative 
endeavors. To men and women of all stations of 
life and all grades of culture He brought a revelation 
of their divine origin, their infinite worth, their un- 
bounded possibilities and their endless and unaging 
existence. 

The skepticism of Jesus reveals His radical nature. 
That is not to say that the Master was a rationalist, 
that He was not a man of reverence and faith. He 
was, on the contrary, the most perfect example of 
faith, of absolute trust in God, in all history. No 
man ever believed in the goodness of God and in the 
essential friendliness of the universe as Jesus believed. 
Nevertheless, though He was not a rationalist, He 
certainly was not a sentimentalist. He was never 
the victim of a venerated but irrational tradition. 


194. 


The Radicalism of Jesus 


He was thoughtful, reflective, searching and challeng- 
ing. Read anew the initial discourses of His public 
ministry and notice with what frequency they were 
punctuated with the word, “Why?” Indeed, I am 
led to feel that Frederick W. Norwood does not over- 
state the case when he says that ‘‘almost half of the 
discourses of Jesus, as they have come down to us, 
are challenges of the orthodoxy of His own day!” 

The cardinal doctrine and proposal of Jesus por- 
trays a most radical innovation. I mean, of course, 
His doctrine and proposal of the Kingdom of 
Heaven. Almost wholly absent in all of the historic 
creeds, always a minor consideration in the realm 
of dogma, and occupying, even to-day, a very sub- 
ordinate place in popular preaching, yet the doctrine 
and proposal of the Kingdom of Heaven constitute 
the major portion of Christ’s Evangel to men and 
nations. And it may be that secular thinkers and 
historians have noted this fact with greater insight 
than Churchmen have. 

“The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven,” says 
Herbert George Wells, “which was the main teaching 
of Jesus, and which plays so small a part in the Chris- 
tian creeds, is.certainly one of the most revolutionary 
doctrines that ever stirred and changed human 
thought. It is small wonder if the world at that time 
failed to grasp its full significance and recoiled in 


195 


Hobart D. McKeehan, S.T.M. 


dismay from even a half apprehension of his tre- 
mendous challenges to the established habits and in- 
stitutions of mankind.” But what we must see is 
that Jesus believed in the Kingdom which He pro- 
claimed, that He was its perfect incarnation and 
that He trusted nothing save spiritual forces for its 
complete realization. 

And because He proposed so radical a doctrine as 
that of the Kingdom of Heaven and placed such im- 
plicit faith in spiritual forces—truth, justice, and 
love—for its realization, Jesus went to the Cross! 
Rejected by those to whom His doctrine was pro- 
claimed, by organized religion no less than by or- 
ganized business and organized politics, He wrote 
His doctrine in unfading letters of crimson. “But,” 
says Giovanni Papini, ‘‘only with the blood in our 
veins can truth be written permanently on the pages 
of earth so that it will not fade under men’s foot- 
steps or under the rainfall of centuries. The Cross 
is the rigorously necessary consequence of the Ser- 
mon onthe Mount. Everything must be paid for, the 
good at a higher price than evil; and the greatest 
good, which is love, must be paid for by the greatest 
evil in men’s power.”? And it was the very learned 
Dean of St. Paul’s who, in his recent Ascension Day 
Sermon, reminded his hearers that “Christ could not 
have gone on living on earth because there never 


196 


The Radicalism of Jesus 


have been wanting evil men who would have crucified 
Him afresh, or otherwise slain Him, pretending that 
they were doing God a service. Such is the way in 
which our misguided race has always treated its 
greatest benefactors, those of whom the world was 
not worthy.” 

And we modern Christians must remember this 
fact: that the religion of Jesus is a religion for 
heroes, and that for us, as for our Master, the only 
road leading to spiritual triumph is the Via Dolo- 
rosa. The man who accepts and proclaims the doc- 
trine of the Kingdom of Heaven with understanding 
and seriousness, who trusts in the ultimate triumph 
of spiritual forces, and who, therefore, lives and 
thinks above the average and ahead of his time— 
that man must pay the price! 

And yet is it not amazing that so many men have 
been willing to pay the price and face a cross? And 
is it not the most hopeful sign of the twentieth cen- 
tury that Christ is persuading men, as never before, 
of the essential truth of His proposals, and that the 
volunteers to His Army of Love were never so numer- 
ous and never more serious? Behold! nowhere, save 
in Christ’s doctrine of the Kingdom, have men been 
able to find a real basis for a Parliament of Man and 
a Federation of the World. 

Even so pessimistic a thinker as Bertrand Russell, 

197 


Hobart D. McKeehan, S.T.M. 


whom no one would venture to call a friend of the 
Church, when he comes to consider the proposals of 
Jesus is wont to admit that “‘if all men could summon 
up the courage and the vision to live in this way in 
spite of obstacles and discouragement, there would 
be no need for the regeneration of the world to begin 
by political and economic reform; all that is needed 
in the way of reform would come automatically, with- 
out resistance, owing to the regeneration of indi- 
viduals.” And such a confession coming, as it does, 
from one who is considered hostile to the Church, is 
certainly significant. 

Nevertheless, there remains a final aspect of the 
proposals of Jesus which makes Him more radical 
still. He alone of all earth’s teachers provides the 
resources that make possible the attainment of His 
ideals and standards. Moses offers Law; Plato 
teaches Truth—but Jesus brings God to men and 
men to God! Jesus gives men no Hill of Difficulty 
to climb without first giving them the needed strength 
wherewith to climb it. He calls men to no moral 
battle without first supplying the weapons which 
make them invincible. He asks them to walk no 
hazardous pathway over which He himself has not 
gone before them. In Jesus and in His Evangel the 
unseen becomes the real, and God becomes man’s 
Ally and Contemporary! 

198 


The Radicalism of Jesus 


This, then, constitutes at least an outline picture 
of the radical Vision and Evangel of the Man of 
Galilee—the most elemental, most searching, and 
most challenging Soul who ever trod the human ways 
of earth! And, to-day, as more than nineteen cen- 
turies ago, He calls to a distracted world and to a 
church which has ever been known by His name, but 
not always by His Spirit, saying: ““Why call ye me, 
Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I say?” 

O Church of the living God, we are summoned to 
give answer; are we Christian enough to take Jesus 
and His proposals in earnest? Are we noble enough 
and heroic enough to put first things first and to seek 
that Kingdom which Jesus proclaimed and then died 
to reveal? Is God, the Father of Jesus and through 
Jesus our Father, so real in our experience and so 
controlling in our convictions as to permit us to trust 
absolutely in spiritual forces for the attainment of a 
Kingdom of holy love? Ifso, then we are the worthy 
heirs of Christ’s radical Spirit and the torchbearers 
in His Triumphal procession up the Hills of Light. 
If not, then we may be religious, but we are not 
Christian! 


199 


%, 


Pie. 

Te 
Wik i 

Wika ‘ 


Wis He 
Pith 
Ah 








While we are listening to the man in the pulpit—‘the 
Speaking Man,” as Carlyle would say—it is not inappropriate 
to hear a sermon from the pew, especially when a great and 
wise teacher talks to us both plainly and hopefully about our 
young people, whose ways of thinking and doing often fill us 
with dismay. Dr. Hawkes came to the chair of mathematics 
in Columbia from Yale University in 1910, and was made 
Dean of the College eight years later, having won distinction 
as a teacher and as the author of standard text-books in 
algebra and geometry. His favorite field of research had been 
hypercomplex numbers, but since his elevation to the deanship 
he has become deeply interested in the hypercomplex state of 
mind in which young men find themselves when torn between 
the old pieties of the home and the shifting moral standards 
and changing vision in religious ideals in the modern world. 
He believes it is possible to live spiritually and think scien- 
tifically, uniting the old values of the spirit with the new vision 
of the world and its laws; and to that end he is a wise mentor 
of bewildered youth. Out of his experience as teacher, friend 
and confidant of young men he speaks in this sermon, and 
when laymen preach such sermons it is time for preachers to 
look well to their laurels. 


THE YOUNGER GENERATION 


HERBERT E. HAWKES 
DEAN OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE, NEW YORK 


Matt. 16: 25. 


My remarks this evening are not from the point 
of view of a student of current theological or religious 
questions. I am quite untouched by the turmoil of 
the ecclesiastical world as to whether a certain clause 
of the creed shall be interpreted in this way or in 
that way. To me the creeds are the great anthems 
of religion which had their origin in the attempt of 
men to express in language the aspirations of their 
hearts for a closer walk with God. I will sing the 
anthem and feel the same aspiration that they felt 
without raising any question of the exact and literal 
meaning of the words. As well refuse to sing a beau- 
tiful song of love or beauty until one can literally 
accept the scientific accuracy of its words as to refuse 
to join in these great symphonies of religious expres- 
sion. But this is merely an observation by a lay- 
man who has already said that he is not versed in 
theology. 

203 


Herbert E. Hawkes 


My theme may be expressed in the following 
words: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose 
it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall 
find it.” 

It is my privilege to meet on very intimate terms 
hundreds of young people and to discuss with them 
every imaginable question that arises in the experi- 
ence of young men between the ages of 15 and 25. 
I wish to talk to you for a few minutes about the 
younger generation. It is easy to be dogmatic when 
speaking on this subject. It is easy for us to criticize 
our fathers as being narrow, somewhat intolerant, and 
insistent on what seems to us an outworn philosophy 
of living. It is even easier to observe in our children 
those tendencies which seem to indicate only frivolity 
and abandon. Just now, however, I do not wish to 
debate or to criticize, but to analyze. What are the 
outstanding facts in our society that will help us to 
understand the younger generation, and will help 
them to understand themselves? And what is the 
underlying reason for these facts? 

During recent years men in every field of thought 
and activity have shown a strong tendency to get 
away from the principles and canons that have been 
generally assumed and accepted for generations. 

The painter nowadays is likely to attempt to 
express his mood by a use of color and by a method 

204 


The Younger Generation 


of composition that seems to many a conservative 
observer grotesque, meaningless, and untrue. Much 
of our modern music does not pretend to get any- 
where. One sound follows another and the entire 
succession is intended only to express in a charming 
manner the phantasy or emotion of the composer. 
But so far as musical form and order or development 
is concerned, there is no such thing in the music that 
we usually call modern. The composer is concerned 
with expressing himself rather than with developing 
a musical subject. 

Up to date education places great emphasis on 
cultivating the individuality of the child instead of 
acquainting him with the rudiments of method and 
information that have in the past nourished and 
equipped the race for their life work. On coming 
_ to school in the morning the modern child is requested 
to tell the teacher what he would like to study (if 
anything) that day. Each topic is preferably taken 
up from the point of view of its functioning in the 
immediate experience of the child. The functioning 
of the subject in the experience of the human race 
is secondary. The orderly exposition of a subject 
of study is not the method of the present-day teacher. 
The present interest of the pupil is the guiding prin- 
ciple, and it is hoped that if the child remains in 
school long enough his individual interest will go the 


205 


Herbert E. Hawkes 


rounds of reading, arithmetic, and so on, and finally 
equip him with the knowledge that he needs for his 
career. But thorough and consecutive progress in a 
subject of study is not the method. 

The test of the true and the good in the philosophy 
of to-day is found in its practicability. An act is right 
if it results in satisfaction to those concerned, not 
if it conforms to some recognized standard of right. 
Anything that works in practice is thereby justified. 

Our poetry is as formless as our music and our 
novels are cross sections of the lives of the characters, 
without the sense of solidity and universality that 
characterized our best novels of years past. Nothing 
is too sordid or too mean to be expressed in full de- 
tail without leaving anything to the reader’s imagina- 
tion. Everything is told. 

Our manners, too, are without the reserve that has 
often been supposed to be the mark of good breeding. 
There is little that cannot be said and done without 
compunction or shame. Principles either do not exist 
or are not considered of weight. The modern indi- 
vidual follows the impulse to behave in the manner 
that seems most convenient at the time. For him, 
law is something to be obeyed only if it comes handy. 

This is the kind of world and atmosphere to which 
our younger generation is introduced and in which 
they are working out their salvation. In art, music, 


206 


The Younger Generation 


and poetry, in education and philosophy the idea of 
conformity to a standard outside of the individual is 
not thought of. In fact the existence of any such 
standard is frequently denied. Religion, dress, 
amusement, all reveal a similar falling away from a 
regard for any fundamental principle, and a corres- 
ponding lack of restraint on the individual, which 
the recognition and acceptance of principles necessa- 
rily involves. These facts are patent to all and per- 
vade every domain of thought and action. 

Such widespread tendencies do not exist without 
a cause that can be expressed in as general terms 
as the tendencies themselves. So far as I can see 
all of these facts have their root in the desire of the 
individual of to-day to express himself. The domi- 
nant principle is that of self-revelation and self-ex- 
pression. The artist expresses kis moods; the writer, 
his emotions; the pupil, dis interests; the youth, his 
own way. None of them, if they are really moderns, 
are consciously attempting to express through their 
art an everlasting and eternal truth which they rec- 
ognize as the standard by which they and their work 
must be measured. This present situation may well 
result from a reaction against the world of fifty or a 
hundred years ago. Then our music was written, for 
the most part, in regular form. ‘Tennyson was the 
great poet; the ladies wore much more comprehensive 

207 


Herbert E. Hawkes 


apparel; our college course was a rigid requirement 
of Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, with a little phi- 
losophy and Hebrew; and our manners were mid- 
Victorian. 

No one can be intimately familiar with the youth 
of to-day without realizing the fact that some of 
the finest fruits of the spirit are encouraged by this 
freedom from restraint and this attempt to express 
what is actually felt by the individual. And they are 
not the outstanding characteristics of our fathers. 
The virtues of frankness, freedom from hypocrisy 
and cant, independence, self-reliance, and ambition 
are developed in a finer and more vital manner by 
our youth of to-day than ever before. Our younger 
generation is trying to work out its own life, to ex- 
press its own thoughts and ambitions as they actually 
exist in their own souls rather than under the guid- 
ance or suppression of dogmas imposed from the out- 
side. The young man of to-day is content if his 
work, or study, contributes to the richness of his own 
life and if the product of his effort truly expresses 
that life. For he is then in accord with the spirit of 
his generation. His struggle is for freedom from the 
influences that would cramp and dwarf his desires, 
his ambitions, and his aspirations. He seeks the 
truth, for he feels that the truth shall make him 
free. Freedom from the dead hand of dogmatism 

208 


The Younger Generation 


and rules, freedom to live his own life, freedom to 
express his own self truly, is the ambition of our 
younger generation. 

If we stopped here without an attempt to inquire 
as to whither it is all tending, the picture would be 
incomplete and not altogether lovely. For the over- 
powering desire for self-expression is often difficult 
to distinguish from selfishness, and complete freedom 
is not unlike chaos and anarchy. For he whose only 
desire is to find his own life shall lose it. But at the 
same time there is nothing more certain than that 
every honest attempt to express the truth that is 
in one, even if the result does seem erratic and out 
of line with the conventionality of our fathers, has 
its value and its effect. 

We find the same situation in the physical world. 
We have learned in recent years that the atom con- 
tains a number of so called electrons, which are dart- 
ing to and fro with almost inconceivable speed and 
in quite unpredictable directions. The motion of 
these smallest of particles is called non-codrdinated, 
because it seems to be entirely without relation to 
any motion of the mass of which they form a part 
and quite incapable of description in terms of laws 
or principles. These electrons, as they rush back 
and forth, are as irresponsible to law and order as any 
member of the younger generation. Now when a gas 


209 


Herbert E. Hawkes 


like steam is confined in a cylinder, the pressure of 
steam on the piston is due to the impact of these 
electrons, which bombard the walls of the cylinder 
with a perfect fusillade of firing. The higher the tem- 
perature of the gas the faster they work. But all 
in a perfectly haphazard manner so far as the indi- 
vidual particles are concerned. Each electron is ex- 
pressing itself regardless of any other electron, rush- 
ing first in one direction, then in another. But what 
is the result? Notwithstanding the haphazard way 
in which the bombardment in the interior of the cylin- 
der seems to be taking place, this bombardment ac- 
tually makes the piston rod move, and that in accord- 
ance with one of the simplest laws of Physics. No 
man would ever have imagined that the wild and un- 
coordinated motion of the electrons would ever be 
brought together so that, irresponsible as each indi- 
vidual is, the result of the whole is team work which 
not only makes the engine move, but can be expressed 
so simply that every school boy understands it. 

The same God that codrdinates the motion of elec- 
trons is Lord of the human spirit. All of the erratic 
and uncoordinated tendencies so prevalent to-day 
will certainly be synthesized, to the end that order 
and simplicity will result. This is a statement based 
on Faith; a Faith that can neither be demonstrated 
nor argued down. 


210 


The Younger Generation 


There is, however, one great difference between 
motion in the atom and in our society. We are not 
electrons. We can help God to do His work of co- 
ordination. Even if we couldn’t He would do it just 
the same. But it would involve more human suffer- 
ing and require more time. 

What can we do about it? He that findeth his life 
shall lose it. The man who is seeking merely for 
self-expression finds that after all he is much more 
interesting to himself than to anybody else and that 
the life that he takes so much pains to save is really 
not worth the trouble if it is taken merely by itself. 
Just one darting electron more or less is not very 
significant. 

What really great men in the history of our land 
have sought to save their own lives? Did Washing- 
ton, did Lincoln, did Lee aim merely at self-expres- 
sion? They each tried to accomplish. the most for 
their cause. They aimed each day to qualify for the 
day’s responsibilities. To think of Abraham Lincoln 
or Robert E. Lee as regarding for a moment their own 
self-development as an end in itself is unthinkable to 
one who knows their heroic lives. Development of 
self solely as a means of more effective effort in be- 
half of some cause greater than one’s self is the only 
kind of self-development that has any place in the 
life of a real man. 

| 211 


Herbert E. Hawkes 


He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. 
Just what does that mean here and now? I might 
enlarge upon the sympathetic and unselfish relation 
that ought to exist in every family, where the older 
as well as the younger generation seeks not to domi- 
nate, but to contribute to an atmosphere of sweet 
reasonableness in which each individual finds a life 
of influence and affection by losing it in the common 
life of the family. I might show how the man on any 
team or in any codperative enterprise counts for 
something only in so far as he places his own success 
second to that of the group with which he is allied. 

I wish rather to indicate the relation of this theme 
to our attitude toward the laws of the land. The 
word is on every one’s lips that we are living in an 
age of contempt for law. But our indifference to stat- 
utory law is only one phase of the situation. It has 
already been observed that we are just as lawless 
in music, philosophy, and manners as we are in our 
capacity of citizens. One cannot lay any great share 
of the blame for our disregard for all law on the 
failure of the community to observe one particular 
law. ‘To be sure the process that we observe in the 
attitude of one individual toward statutory law is a 
cumulative one. To feel a lack of restraint leads us 
to break a law; the breaking of a law increases our 
lack of restraint and so we goon. But to assert that 

212 


The Younger Generation 


the fundamental trouble arises from our restlessness 
under any one law is like saying that the waving of 
the branches of the trees makes the wind blow. The 
difficulty is much deeper and more fundamental than 
any one law, and unless we regain our spirit of team 
play and each think less of enjoying our own lives 
and more of the common good we shall lose what we 
are short-sightedly struggling to save. 

In this nation we pride ourselves on our democracy. 
This means majority rule. No one ever claimed that 
the majority is always or necessarily ever right. But 
the way we have agreed to get things done is to fol- 
low laws which the majority agrees upon. If one 
does not like the result it is his duty as a citizen to 
do his utmost to convince some of the majority that 
they are wrong. But in the meantime the ideal citi- 
zen obeys the law of which he does not approve. As 
a last appeal when everything else fails recourse to 
the right of revolution may be necessary. This coun- 
try would never have broken from the mother coun- 
try unless we had decided that repeal was hopeless 
and revolution the only way of escape. 

At the present time, however, we are in the gravest 
danger of unconsciously bringing about a revolution 
of which few of us would approve or desire. Each of 
us is trying to live as a law unto himself, to have 
his own way, to save his own life and let everything 

213 


Herbert E. Hawkes 


else take care of itself. The very existence not only 
of our government, but of the democratic form of 
government, depends upon the acceptance by the 
community of the decisions of the majority and of 
securing the modification of laws that are unwise not 
by breaking them or encouraging others to break 
them, but by attempting to convert the minority into 
a majority. Nothing can be clearer than that unless 
we are willing to lose our own lives, temporarily at — 
any rate, and to accept the principles of following 
the agreements reached by the majority, our demo- 
cratic institutions are doomed. 

Right here is the danger that besets the youth of 
to-day. Just as our fathers with their dogmatism 
and rules ran the risk of a rigid and uncompromising 
attitude, of hypocrisy and intolerance, so to-day we 
are in danger of selfish disregard of the welfare 
of others and a chaotic breaking down of our insti- 
tutions and governments. 

I do not yield to any one in my faith and confidence 
in the younger generation. Although they are caught 
in this whirlwind of unrestraint they are honest, more 
honest than their fathers, and they are seeking to 
discover the fundamental verities. Although they 
seem to be seeking to save their own lives, I firmly 
believe that as many of them are ready to throw 
themselves into the struggle for the cause of Right- 

214 


The Younger Generation 


eousness as they were in 1917 and to lose themselves 
in behalf of the common good if they only see it. 
If they can recognize the direction which the unco-. 
ordinated motions of our restless activities is destined 
to follow, our youth will respond. What can they 
take as their guide? There is only one adequate 
cuide. 

“He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” 

‘“‘And whosoever shall be chief among you let him 
be your servant.” 

“Tf thy brother shall trespass against thee, go 
and tell him his fault between thee and him alone; 
if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.” 

“And he answered them, saying, Who is my 
mother or my brethren? And he looked round on 
them which sat about him, and said, Behold my 
mother and my brethren.” 

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, 
and with all thy strength.” This is the first com- 
mandment, and the second is like it, namely this: 
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” There is 
no other commandment greater than these. 


PA'S) 





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How deeply the World War left its mark upon the Christian 
mind of our generation only the Searcher of human hearts will 
ever know, much less record. But it needed no divination to 
detect its profound—almost shattering—impact upon the 
younger men of the pulpit, among whom Dr. Tittle is one of 
the most gifted. An Ohio man, educated at Ohio Wesleyan 
University and Drew Theological Seminary, the War found him 
the brilliant and beloved pastor of the Broad Street Methodist 
Church, Columbus. He spent two months in the army camps 
at home and six months at the front, taking part in the St. 
Mihiel offensive, where he saw what war is when stripped of 
fine phrases and “the dream those drummers make.” When 
he preached for me in the City Temple in London there were 
those who felt in his words—vivid, searching, appealing, and 
still remembered—the ache of a heart well-nigh broken. One 
hears an echo of the same note in his lectures on What Must 
the Church do to be Saved? with their portrayal of the ghastly 
deficit between the impotence of organized religion and the ap- 
palling need of the time. Such is the background—remote, but 
still visible—of the sermon here to be read, dealing with the 
tragedy of clashing loyalties, which speaks for a goodly com- 
pany of elect youth—not all of them pacifists—in whom na- 
tionalism is in conflict with the universalism of Jesus. As a 
statement of the supreme spiritual loyalty and a plea for a 
tolerant and free discussion of lesser obligations, it is a notable 
utterance—at once a torch and a token of the times. 


THE SUPREME LOYALTY 


ERNEST E. TITTLE, D.D. 
FIRST METHODIST CHURCH, EVANSTON, ILL. 


“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not 
worthy ‘of me; and he that loveth sou or daughter more than 
me 1s not worthy of me.” Matt. 10: 37. 


I 


To the question, What is your supreme loyalty? 
there is, I venture to think, only one answer which 
those of us who are gathered here this morning would 
be willing to give. One after another, would we not 
promptly and unequivocally answer, My supreme 
loyalty is to Jesus Christ? 

This answer would be given by those among us 
whose faith in Christ rests upon the authority of 
the holy catholic church with its nineteen centuries 
of persistent witness to the lordship of Jesus. And 
it would be given with equal fervor by those of us 
whose faith in Christ rests upon the conviction that 
the accumulating experience of mankind has proved 
that Jesus is, indeed, the Lord of life. We verily be- 
lieve that only in him is there fullness of life for the 


individual or for the world. 
219 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


And so we are ready this morning to pledge our 
supreme allegiance to Jesus Christ. In answer to 
the question, ‘“‘Do you confess Him as your Lord and 
Master?” we would say, as one of our number actu- 
ally did say a few minutes ago, “I do.” Some of 
us might say it with a certain lightness of heart. 
Others might say it with a very considerable search- 
ing of heart. Some of us might say it without think- 
ing through the implications of our avowal. Others 
might say it with a fairly clear notion of the possible 
costliness of such an avowal. But to hundreds of us 
there would seem to be no other possible answer that 
we could bring ourselves to make. We cannot but 
repeat after Jesus himself that searching saying, “He 
that loveth father or mother more than me is not 
worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter 
more than me is not worthy of me.” Nor can we fail 
to see that although, in this saying, only two great 
human relationships are mentioned, others are im- 
plied. He, for instance, that loveth his university 
more than Christ is not worthy of Christ. He that 
loveth his country more than Christ is not worthy of 
Christ. Are not these admissions also involved? 
And who among us would hesitate to make them? 

When Jesus said, ‘“‘He that loveth father or mother 
more than me is not worthy of me,” he was, of course, 
thinking of himself not merely as a human individual, 

220 


The Supreme Loyalty 


but as a spiritual symbol of the kingdom of God. 
Supreme loyalty to him meant supreme loyalty to 
the kingdom of God in heaven and on earth. And 
let us keep steadily before us the important fact that 
when a man pledges supreme loyalty to the kingdom 
of God, far from surrendering any lesser loyalty, he 
glorifies every other loyalty. 

When, for instance, a man takes the position that 
his supreme loyalty is not to his wife nor to his 
children, but to Jesus Christ, does his family lose by 
such an allegiance? Does it not rather gain by it all 
those splendid spiritual values which, down the cen- 
turies, have made every truly Christian home a place 
of refuge and of inspiration? John Bunyan went to 
jail rather than be untrue to his conscience. He did 
not enjoy the thought of going to jail. He said, “‘The 
parting of my wife and poor children hath often been 
to me in this place as the pulling of flesh off my 
bones.”” One of his children was blind; and he said 
that the thought of the hardships this poor blind one 
might be called upon to undergo almost broke his 
heart to pieces. Yet, in loyalty to his convictions, he 
remained in Bedford jail twelve years. Did _ his 
family suffer by reason of his supreme allegiance to 
Christ? In one sense, Yes. But only in the sense 
of physical hardship; only in the sense of physical 
separation. Never in the sense of spiritual tragedy; 

PBA 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


never in the sense of spiritual separation. And in 
respect of all those noble spiritual loyalties which 
bind one human soul to other human souls until 
death, and beyond death, and which dignify and 
glorify domestic relationships, the Bunyan family 
gained by this supreme allegiance to Christ. 

Did the family as an institution suffer by reason 
of this one man’s decision to go to jail rather than 
be untrue to his own conscience? Were any divorces 
occasioned by it? Were husbands who learned of 
John Bunyan’s incarceration for conscience’ sake 
tempted by reason of it to be disloyal to their wives? 
Were fathers who heard of his courageous stand for 
principle led by reason of it to neglect their children? 
Did any single home in England suffer spiritual ship- 
wreck because of John Bunyan’s action? Has not 
every home in the Anglo-Saxon world in which Pil- 
grim’s Progress has been read and reread as a reli- 
gious classic been brought into a surer cohesion by 
reason of its author’s supreme allegiance to Christ? 

When a student takes the position that his supreme 
loyalty is not to his university, but to Jesus Christ, 
does his university lose by such an allegiance? Does 
it lose any great intellectual or spiritual value for 
which a university is supposed to stand? Financial 
support it may lose. But what shall it profit a uni- 
versity if it gain millions for buildings or for endow- 

222 


s 


The Supreme Loyalty 


ment, and lose its own soul—its opportunity for real 
intellectual leadership? Popular approval it may 
lose. But if a university, even in the face of popular 
passion—the spirit of the mob—may not maintain 
freedom of discussion and freedom of conscience, 
what moral right has it to live? No, when a student 
takes the position that his supreme loyaliy musi be 
loyaliy to some high and challenging ideal, his unt- 
versity gains in respect of all those truly cultural val- 
ues which universities exist to foster. 

And when some patriot takes the position that his 
supreme loyalty is not to his country, but to Jesus 
Christ, does his country suffer by such an allegiance? 
Only the unthinking man will ever say that it does. 

“He who loves not his home and country which 
he has seen, how can he love humanity in general 
which he has not seen?” . So asks Dean Inge. And 
he adds: “There are, after all, few emotions of which 
one has less reason to be ashamed than the little lump 
which the Englishman feels when he first catches sight 
of the white cliffs of Dover.” A statement which 
you and I, applauding, might amend so as to read 
—‘“‘which the returning American feels when he first 
catches sight of the Statue of Liberty.” 

When some man expresses a chivalric concern for 
the welfare of women, we are entitled to know how 
great is his devotion to that particular woman who 

220 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


has taken him for better, for worse, for richer, for 
poorer, in sickness and in health till death do them 
part. And when some man expresses a comprehen- 
sive concern for the welfare of mankind, we are 
entitled to know how much he is doing for that par- 
ticular portion of mankind which constitutes the 
community in which he lives. 

But if it does not follow that because a man’s 
supreme allegiance is to Jesus Christ, his own family 
through him is going to suffer, neither does it follow 
that because a man’s supreme allegiance is to the 
kingdom of God his own country through him is 
going to suffer. The supreme allegiance of Socrates 
was not to Athens, but to truth; wherefore, he in- 
sisted, his fellow-citizens, instead of punishing him, 
ought to maintain him at public expense. 

How utterly superficial the notion that in order 
to be loyal to her husband a wife must endorse every- 
thing her husband says or does! Must she not some- 
times, if she is to be truly loyal to him, take excep- 
tion to what he says, and disapprove of what he 
does? And is not equally superficial the notion that 
in order to be loyal to one’s country one must en- 
dorse everything that one’s country has ever done, 
is doing, or contemplates doing? Was either Ulysses 
S. Grant or Abraham Lincoln disloyal to his country 
when he condemned our war with Mexico?, Was 

224. 


The Supreme Loyalty 


Lloyd George disloyal to his country when he con- 
demned, in the very midst of it, her war with South 
Africa? Was Carl Liebnecht disloyal to his country 
when he condemned the invasion of Belgium, and the 
whole position of Germany’s militaristic and imperial- 
istic group? 

When some man takes the position that loyalty 
to country involves unquestioning approval of every- 
thing that his country does, does he not take a posi- 
tion in which he is utterly powerless to save his 
country from policies that have in them the seeds of 
disaster? If a man really loves his country, if he 
sincerely desires his country’s welfare, must he not 
take the position that his supreme loyalty is not to 
country, but to Christ—to truth, to justice, to hu- 
manity, to God? As each Sunday morning, on every 
battleship in the United States navy, above even that 
dear flag which symbolizes native land, there is 
hoisted that white flag which symbolizes the kingdom 
of God, must not every truly loyal American, in his 
own soul, place the white flag above every other? 

From any man who does take that position, what 
has his country to fear? Is he the kind of man who 
goes profiteering in war time? Is he the kind of man 
who puts rotten leather in shoes that are to be worn 
by soldiers? Is he the kind of man who is willing 
- to misrepresent the amount of income tax he owes 


APA 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


to his government? Is he the kind of man who in 
Washington, to-day, would be suspected by anybody 
to be involved in an oil scandal? Or a fight-film 
scandal? Or a veteran’s bureau scandal? Or any 
other kind of scandal? Men who swear allegiance to 
high ideals are not always wise. T heir judgment, I 
mean, is not always faultless. But, when all is said, 
are they the men of whom their country has reason 
to feel afraid? Are not they just the men on whom 
their country may confidently rely? 

He who loves his father or mother more than Christ 
is not only unworthy of Christ, he is unworthy of his 
father and mother. He who loves his university 
more than Christ is not only unworthy of Christ, 
he is unworthy of his university. He who loves his 
country more than Christ is not only unworthy of 
Christ, he is unworthy of his country. The higher 
loyalty, far from betraying the lesser loyalty, is the 
one thing in all the world that can guarantee the 
lesser loyalty! 


II 


But now, having stressed this fact, I must, in all 
candor, call attention to another fact—for increasing 
numbers of persons a peculiarly torturing fact— 
namely, that the higher loyalty and the lesser loyal- 

226 


The Supreme Loyalty 


ties do sometimes seem to clash. I have said that 
to the question, “Do you confess Christ as your 
Lord and Master?” we who are gathered here this 
morning would feel that there is for us but one 
answer—“I do.” In our heart of hearts we really 
want to be supremely loyal to Jesus Christ. But 
we are dwelling in the midst of a civilization that is 
semi-pagan. We live and move and have our being 
in a world that does not, on the whole, accept, much 
less practise, the principles of Jesus. We are citizens 
of a state that is less than Christian. How, then, ts 
it going to be possible for us to discharge the duties 
of citizenship in a less than Christian state; to live 
and labor in a world where hideously unchristian 
deeds are not only done but commanded; to dwell 
in the midst of a semi-pagan civilization, and main- 
tain, through everything, our loyalty to Christ? 
That is the question which confronts many a mod- 
ern business man who deep down in his heart en- 
dorses, and enthusiastically applauds, the ethical 
teachings of Jesus, but who, each Monday morning, 
as he returns to his office, finds it immensely difficult 
to apply them. He holds, let us suppose, a subordi- 
nate position in some large mercantile or manufac- 
turing establishment. And every once in a while he 
is asked to do, or at least to approve, something which 
he simply cannot reconcile with the teachings of 
227 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


Jesus. But how, oh, how shall he solve his moral 
problem? If he gives up this position, where will 
he go to find another position in which he may be 
free to hold fast his allegiance to Christ? 

This moral problem becomes excruciatingly diffi- 
cult when a Christian is ordered by a less than Chris- 
tian state, in a semi-pagan world, to take up arms 
against his fellows. I do not happen to know any- 
thing about the officer in charge of the submarine 
which discharged the torpedo that sank the ‘‘Lusi- 
tania.”’ But let us just suppose this morning that 
in his heart of hearts he wanted to be loyal to Jesus 
Christ. He received an order from his government 
to sink a ship carrying munitions—and women and 
children. What should he have done? In time of 
war, a man who really desires to be loyal to Jesus 
Christ may be ordered to bomb a city, or to explode 
poison gas shells over it, or to foul its water supply, 
or to cut off its food supply, or (it is now hinted) 
to release disease germs in it, or in some other fiend- 
ish way to inflict suffering, not only upon men, but 
upon women and children. What, under. such cir- 
cumstances, should a Christian do? When Christ 
says, ““Treat every man as a brother,” and the state 
says, ‘“Treat certain men as your enemies”; when 
Christ says, ‘‘Maintain toward every man an attitude 
of good-will,” and the state says that good-will to- 

tae 


The Supreme Loyalty 


ward enemies is not permissible, what should a Chris- 
tian do? 

Now this, I think, is a question which every mod- 
ern disciple of Jesus ought to be putting to his own 
soul. It is a question which, in my judgment, cannot 
longer be evaded. And it is a question which every 
follower of Christ will have to answer for himself. 
You cannot answer it for me. I cannot answer it for 
you. No man may answer it for his brother. If 
some disciple of Jesus comes to the conclusion that, 
in the event of another war, there is but one thing 
for him to do, and that is to serve his country by 
bearing arms, it is not for me, or for any other man, 
to say to him that in that case he will cease to be a 
Christian. And if some disciple of Jesus comes to 
the conclusion that, in the event of another war, he 
must, in some way, serve his country, but that he 
cannot, under any circumstances, consent to bear 
arms, to kill, to inflict suffering upon women and 
children, it is not for me, or for any man, to say 
to him that, in that case, he will cease to be a 
Christian. 

Certainly, let me add, it is not for the Christian 
church to discourage any of her sons or daughters 
who are making earnest, and even agonizing, efforts 
to be loyal to Jesus Christ. Whatever attitude the 
state may feel obliged to take toward the ‘‘conscien- | 

| 229 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


tious objector,” the Christian church ought not to 
make more difficult his already terribly difficult path. 
If the state decides that in the interest of public 
safety he should be sent to jail, the church cannot 
keep him out; but the church can, and should, let 
him feel that he possesses her profoundest respect for 
his brave allegiance to what seems to him to be the 
command of Christ. 

As for the church herself, I, for my part, feel very 
sure that she ought never again, in her official ca- 
pacity, to bless war. She cannot dictate to her sons 
and daughters how they shall solve their moral prob- 
lem. She must not, in my judgment, attempt to leg- 
islate in respect of a matter which concerns so vitally 
the individual conscience. But this one thing she 
may do. She may refuse to call holy that which 1s 
hideous. She may refuse to call right that which ts 
wrong. She may humbly confess her own share of 
the awful failure to prevent war. But by what kind 
of moral hocus-pocus may she justify her shame? 
Let the church never assume a holier than thou atti- 
tude. But, in the name of truth, let her never again 
say that black is white. And, in the name of Christ, 
let her never again officially participate in an orgy of 
killing and hate. Let her keep herself in some truly 
and nobly Christian sense “above the battle’”—above 
the massacre and the madness—so that anguished 

250 


The Supreme Loyalty 


men and women on both sides of the conflict may 
know that there is, in a mad-house world, at least one 
great organization that is keeping sane and calm 
and kind and Christ-like; and by that knowledge be 
comforted and sustained and filled with hope. 

If, in the event of another war, the church should 
maintain an attitude such as this, is it not at least 
possible that, at the close of the war, she could influ- 
ence, for the good of all, the terms of peace? 


III 


There is, I think, still another fact to which atten- 
tion needs to be called. I have said that the problem 
presented at this present time to a thoroughly Chris- 
tian conscience is a truly terrible one. I have said 
that it is a problem which each disciple of Jesus must 
solve for himself. Now let me suggest that in order 
that he may have a fair chance to solve it; in order, 
indeed, that the whole world may have a fair chance 
to find some way out of the awful situation which 
now confronts it, there must be full freedom of dis- 
cussion even in respect to the moral legitimacy of 
existing laws of the land. So long as any law stands, 
he who violates it must be prepared to pay the pen- 
alty. But to take the position that, once a law has 
been passed, it is not permissible even to question _ 


231 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


its moral legitimacy, is to take a position which, if 
it could be maintained, would stop moral progress 
forever. , 

Fortunately, for those of us who live in America, 
the very constitution of our government guarantees 
freedom of discussion. Its first amendment reads: 
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establish- 
ment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise 
thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of 
the press; or the right of the people peaceably to 
assemble, and to petition the government for a re- 
dress of grievances.” How very inconsistent the 
position of persons who demand a one hundred per- 
cent loyalty to the constitution of the United States 
and then try to limit freedom of discussion! 

But quite apart from this constitutional guaran- 
tee, would it not be a bad day for America if the 
state should attempt to dictate to its teachers what 
they shall teach, or to its preachers what they shall 
preach? Would not such a situation prove as intol- 
erable in America as it proved in Russia and in 
Germany? Would it not turn out to be as dangerous 
for America as it was for Russia and for Germany? 

If the universities of America ever turn over their 
intellects into the keeping of the state, they will be 
as powerless to guide the people of America as were 
the universities of Germany to guide the people of 

232 


The Supreme Loyalty 


Germany. If the churches of America ever turn over 
their consciences into the keeping of the state, they 
will be as powerless to save the people of America 
as were the churches of Germany to save the people 
of Germany. During the war, and immediately after 
it, how many times we put the question: ‘‘Why did 
not the people of Germany rise up against their mili- 
tary masters?” But is it not the answer to this ques- 
tion just the very significant fact that the people of 
Germany were kept in ignorance by their masters; 
that they were denied by their masters any chance 
either to know, or to discuss, political truth? God 
forbid that America should ever adopt those methods 
of terrorism and of oppression which drove Germany 
into ruin such as has befallen no other nation in mod- 
ern times. 

I remember hearing one of my professors in the 
theological school relate an experience which he had 
in Germany about twenty years ago. He had made 
some remark a bit derogatory to the Kaiser. His 
remark was overheard and reported to the police. A 
kind friend gave him a tip that he was about to be 
arrested. He took the next train to the coast, crossed 
the channel, hurried up to London, and went to Hyde 
Park, where, as he said, he might “cuss” the king 
to his heart’s content. I used to tell this story dur- 
ing the war in order to illustrate the difference be- 

2Od 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


tween the German method and the British method. 
I believed then, and I believe now, that the British 
method was far, far better than the German method. 
In England, for generations, men have claimed and 
exercised freedom of.discussion. Has freedom of dis- 
cussion made England weak? No, freedom of dis- 
cussion has made the English government one of the 
strongest and most stable governments in all the 
world. ‘Think of a nation passing from a tory gov- 
ernment to a labor government without a financial 
crash! 

And now, are we Americans, at this late hour, go- 
ing to adopt the discredited and discarded German 
method? We who sing 


My country, ’tis of thee, 
Sweet land of liberty? 


Are we going to renounce our political heritage? Are 
we going to repudiate our own political history? 
Are we going to say, ‘“‘Our fathers brought forth upon 
this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty”; 
but we, their sons, have become afraid of liberty? 
“With a great sum,” said a Roman freedman, to 
a Christian missionary, “obtained I this freedom.” 
And the missionary proudly replied, ““But I am free 
born.” With a great sum our fathers obtained ‘“‘this 
freedom” which we, free-born Americans, up until 


234 


a i — 


The Supreme Loyalty 


now have enjoyed. Back of the American Revolution 
is the English Revolution. And back of the English 
Revolution is that great charter, a copy of which 
may be seen to-day in the British Museum, “injured 
by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging 
from the shriveled parchment’’—that Magna Charta 
of Anglo-Saxon liberties. With a great sum obtained 
they this freedom—John Eliot, John Hampton, John 
Pym, John Hancock, George Washington, Benjamin 
Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson. 
May God forbid that now, in days of passion 
and panic, we should throw away so great and pre- 
cious and costly a heritage. Freedom of discussion 
we must claim and exercise tf either as individuals, or 
as a nation, we are to have any real chance to solve 
our most momentous problems. 

And now, for one brief, closing moment let us re- 
turn to the thought with which we started, that our 
supreme loyalty is to Jesus Christ. If our profession 
of Christianity amounts to anything, each of us in 
his own way, but each of us in some way, must strive 
to crown him Lord of all. It is hardly to be expected 
that we shall all choose the same way of trying to 
rid the world of its greatest existing curse—the curse 
of war and of the whole war system. But, in Christ’s 
name, let us choose some way! How dare we, as 
Christians, remain passive while forces are generating 


235 


Ernest E. Tittle, D.D. 


to hurl the world into another catastrophe unimag- 
inably awful? How dare we let governments blun- 
der along into another abyss through lack of moral 
initiative? Is it not for Christians, of all people, to 
furnish moral initiative? To take with respect to 
war a position 7m advance of the average conscience, 
and then by unsleeping educational effort bring the 
long-suffering, because uninformed, masses of man- 


kind to the point where they will demand that war _ 


be placed in the same category with dueling, piracy, 
and slavery? 

Then, but not until then, will loyalty to Christ no 
longer clash with loyalty to Cesar. For then church 
and state will together stand at the feet of Jesus 
and crown him Lord of all. 


236 


| 





THE SOURCES OF SURPLUS POWER 
IN HUMAN LIFE 


Mr. Gilkey was born in Watertown, Mass., in 1889, grad- 
uated from Harvard, and after studying in the Universities of 
Berlin and Marburg, took his theological training at Union 
Seminary, New York. Ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 
19106, he served for one year as assistant minister of Bryn Mawr 
Church, and since 1917 has been pastor of the South Congrega- 
tional Church, Springfield, Mass. He directs an elaborate pro- | 
gram of institutional work, and has introduced the motion pic- 
ture as a definite part of his educational plan. As college 
preacher at Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and New York, he 
is both attractive and effective. The present sermon is typical 
of the effort of our younger preachers to apply the findings of 
psychology in helping restless and distracted men and women 
to discover, develop, and employ spiritual energies in daily 
life, thereby realizing personal efficiency through religious ex- 
perience. It is a lesson in spiritual hygiene, and if there had 
been more preaching of a sort similar some of the popular cults 
of the day would never have come into being. 


THE SOURCES OF SURPLUS POWER IN 
HUMAN LIFE 


JAMES GORDON GILKEY 
SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SPRINGFIELD, MASS. 


“IT am come that they might have life... more abun- 
danily.” John ro: 10. 


One of the great figures in the rescue mission work 
of recent years was S. H. Hadley. The story of his 
own deliverance from the drink habit has been quoted 
frequently by psychologists. “One Tuesday I was 
sitting in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless, friendless, 
dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything 
that would bring a drink. I had not eaten for days, 
and for four nights I had suffered with delirium tre- 
mens from midnight till morning. I had often said: 
‘I will never be a tramp. I will never be cornered. 
When the time comes I will find a home in the bot- 
tom of the river.’ But when the time did come, I 
was not able to walk a quarter of the way there... . 
Toward evening it came into my head to go to the 
Jerry McAuley Mission. The place was packed, 
and it was with difficulty that I made my way to 
the space near the platform. McAuley rose and told 

239 


James Gordon Gilkey 


his experience. I found myself saying: ‘I wonder 
if God can save me?’ Then I listened to the testi- 
mony of twenty or thirty other people, every one of 
them saved from rum. I made up my mind that I 
would be saved too, or die right there. When the 
invitation was given I knelt down with a crowd of 
drunkards. What a conflict was going on for my 
poor soul! Something within me said, ‘Come!’ 
Something else said, ‘Be careful!’ I hesitated a mo- 
ment, and then with a breaking heart I cried: ‘Dear 
Jesus, can you save me?’ Never can I describe 
what happened. Up to that moment I had been filled 
with utter darkness. Now the brightness of noonday 
seemed to stream around me. I was a free man 
again. From that moment I have never wanted a 
drink of whiskey, and I have never seen money 
enough to make me take one.” 

What had happened to that man? Before that 
moment in the Mission he was enslaved and beaten. 
After that moment he was free and victorious. Why 
was he suddenly able to do the thing he had never 
been able to do before? Most of us would probably 
agree on this answer. Somewhere or other Hadley 
had found a new source of power. It was great 
enough to resurrect his buried self, and keep that 
buried self—his better self—permanently dominant. 
Call that new source of power what you will., The 

240 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


fact was that Hadley had stumbled upon it, and in 
a moment it changed his whole life. 

This is no isolated instance. All through history 
and everywhere about us to-day you find people who 
have had this experience in one form or another. 
Some of these people had, like Hadley, been fighting 
the coarsest of human vices for years. Some of them 
were of a wholly different type. Living for a long 
time on a relatively high level of character and 
achievement, they were suddenly lifted to new 
heights of power. In essence the experience of all 
these people is similar. Up to a certain moment their 
range of action is relatively small. Then comes an 
instant of psychological release, personal emancipa- 
tion, spiritual re-birth—call it what you will. And 
the next moment these people find themselves doing 
what had hitherto been impossible. Take this inci- 
dent from a recent English biography. The back- 
ground is entirely different from that of Hadley’s 
life, but the experience of feeling a sudden access of 
power is essentially the same. ‘‘We both were awak- 
ened early in the morning by a cry of pain, sharp 
and insufferable. We knew whose voice it was, and 
we ran down the hall to the little parlor at the left. 
Father was standing there—his hands clenched in 
his black hair, his eyes full of misery and amazement, 
his face white as that of the dead. He frightened 

241 


James Gordon Gilkey 


us. He saw this, or else his intense will mastered his 
agony. Taking his hands from his head he said 
slowly and gently, ‘Let us give thanks.’ He turned 
to a little sofa in the room. There lay our mother, 
dead.” Where did that sudden self-mastery come 
from? What was the power that enabled that man 
to regain composure and face the tragedy with in- 
credible poise? The answer is the one we suggested 
a moment ago. Men stumble on new sources of 
spiritual power, and then find themselves doing what 
seemed—five minutes before—impossible. 


I 


What are these sources of surplus power? Can 
they be found and used by ordinary people and under 
normal circumstances? In recent years scientists 
have been studying this problem as it has never been 
studied before. They have begun to reach conclu- 
sions which are of the utmost importance to Chris- 
tianity. For these conclusions are opening before 
us a new hope—the hope that we shall be able some 
day to remake human personalities as we have al- 
ready succeeded in remaking parts of the physical 
universe. We are now sure that there are at least 
two sources of surplus power in human life, utilized 
blindly by the men of the past and waiting. to be 

242 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


utilized intelligently by the men of the present. 
Suppose this morning we consider what these two 
sources of surplus power are and discuss what we 
now know about using them. 

The first source of surplus power in your life is 
your own hidden self. Recently a British neurologist 
made an interesting experiment on three young men 
in the hope of determining the range—above as well 
as below normal—of their physical strength. These 
men took the conventional series of tests, and their 
strength—under normal circumstances—was care- 
fully noted. Then they were hypnotized, told re- 
peatedly that they were physical weaklings, and put 
through the tests again. To every one’s surprise, 
their strength dropped to only 30% of normal. 
Then, still under hypnosis, they were told that they 
possessed unlimited power. Over and over again this 
suggestion was made to them, while they went 
through the tests for the third time. It was startling 
to find that their strength not only went back to 
normal, but actually rose to 140% of normal. They 
were more than a third stronger than they had ever 
been before. Where did that extra 40% of strength 
come from? Obviously it did not come from outside. 
There was no outside place from which it could 
come. It came from somewhere inside—from re- 
serves of power that had been called into final action. 

243 


James Gordon Gilkey 


That experiment explains our new conception of hu- 
man personality. Your self is no sharply defined 
and rigidly circumscribed thing. Your powers are 
constantly varying in extent—shrinking under one 
set of influences. and expanding under another. 
Most of the time you see only part of your potential 
abilities, as a general on a battlefield sees only part 
of his army. Off in the distant regions of the per- 
sonality are your reserves, waiting to be summoned 
into action. Sudden need, sudden emotion, sudden 
inspiration, or a summons that you yourself have ar- 
ranged will bring them streaming out of that hinter- 
land to offer you their surplus energy. We all know 
from experience how true this is in the matter of 
physical exertion. In a crisis even a weakling will 
display the strength of a giant. The same thing is 
true of your spiritual powers—your endurance, your 
poise, your ability to achieve. Under normal circum- 
stances you see only part of these powers. The rest 
are waiting off in the recesses of the self for the sum- 
mons to action that will bring them scurrying out of 
the darkness to help you. You question all this? 
Watch yourself the next time you meet a spiritual 
emergency! Will you break under the strain, go to 
pieces, collapse in tears and tremblings? Nothing 
of the kind! Your reserves will rush forward to save 
you, just as they did in the case we quoted from 


244 


aS ee ———— 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


the English biography. The extra 40%—-spiritual 
as well as physical. And it exists in every one of us. 
Rufus Jones writes: ‘‘There are within reach of us 
all vast reservoirs of spiritual energy, if we only knew 
how to tap them. There are great stores of power, 
if we could only find the key. Happy are the men 
and women who, at the critical moments of life, suc- 
ceed in breaking through the walls within themselves 
and gaining access to these storehouses of surplus 
energy.” 

How can we call in these reserves of the self? Re- 
cent study has suggested two ways. The first is this: 
If you want to utilize your reserve powers, you must 
resolutely sweep from your life the obstacles that 
block these reserves as they struggle forward to aid 
you. We see clearly now what some of these inner 
obstacles—“‘inhibitions”’ we call them—are. Fear is 
one of the worst. If there are great fears and haunt- 
ing worries in your mind you need never expect to 
utilize the ultimate spiritual energies of your per- 
sonality. The energies are there, and they are for- 
ever struggling to come to your aid—new courage, 
surplus hope, extra poise. But your fears and worries 
barricade them within the recesses of the self. Try 
as they will, they cannot pass that boundary you have 
allowed to rise. You doubt all this? Look at the 
next ‘‘worrier” you meet. Does he give the appear- 


245 


James Gordon Gilkey 


ance of getting all of himself into action, or only a 
scant 30%? The sense of guilt is another inner ob- 
stacle. We may not be able to explain why, but the 
experience of ten thousand times ten thousand proves 
the fact. If a man has done wrong, knows he has done 
wrong, and is beset day and night by some haunting 
sense of guilt, he need never expect to swing all his 
powers into action. He has a divided self—in the 
foreground a few meager abilities, then the strange 
barrier his sense of guilt has erected, and behind that 
all the powers he needs for triumphant living. You 
question that? See how much fine work you can do, 
how well you can concentrate all your powers, when 
you have a guilty conscience. A treasured grudge is 
perhaps the strangest inner barrier of all. Most of 
us know from experience what a sense of inner relief 
comes when we drop an ancient quarrel, forgive and 
forget, and begin to smile again. Why does the sense 
of inner relief, relaxed tension, release of power fol- 
low so inevitably? Because that grudge had built a 
barrier across the personality. Part of our spiritual 
power was imprisoned behind it, pushing and strain- 
ing to find its normal outlet. Sweep the barrier away, 
and the self is instantly reunited. The strain vanishes 
automatically. Here are the conclusions we are 
reaching to-day, thanks to our new psychological 
science. Did you ever realize that Jesus sensed these 


246 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


facts centuries ago? Listen. ‘Be not anxious for 
the morrow.” Why was Jesus so eager to drive fear 
from human lives? Because He realized that fear 
divides self, interrupts the normal flow of spiritual 
power, robs men of their reserves of strength, and 
finally leaves them weak and beaten. “Blessed are 
the pure in heart. They shall see God.” Why was 
Jesus so eager to make men cleanse their lives of 
every taint of sin, every shadow of the sense of 
guilt? Because He sensed the fact that any con- 
sciousness of wrong-doing divides a human life, and 
robs it of all its surplus power. The more abundant 
life, with its vivid sense of God, the great gift Jesus 
had for humanity, is impossible as long as sin piles 
its bleak wall across the very center of the person- 
ality. ‘“‘Forgive, even until seventy times seven.” 
Why forgive, over and over again? Jesus knew what 
havoc a grudge works, not only on the persons against 
whom it is directed, but even more on the person 
who holds it. We must forgive ... or the secret 
wall of hatred shuts from us all the reserves that 
would change our defeat into victory. Scientific 
study is proving all this true to-day. Spiritual 
genius revealed it to Jesus centuries ago. 
Here is the other way to call in the reserves of 
your personality. Believe better things about your- 
self ae your value to the world. Few people realize 
247 


James Gordon Gilkey 


what a tremendous effect a man’s belief about himself 
exerts on his own inner nature. For centuries men 
have felt blindly that there was some such connec- 
tion, and they have formulated such proverbs as “He 
wins who thinks he can,” “‘According to your faith 
be it unto you.” ‘To-day we are beginning to realize 
that these vague suppositions are susceptible of lab- 
oratory verification. The reiterated suggestion of 
weakness makes a man believe wretched things about 
himself, and his strength drops—as the British neu- 
rologist proved—to only a fraction of normal. The 
reiterated suggestion of power makes a man believe 
fine things about himself, and his strength rises far 
above normal. Your belief about yourself either 
holds back or calls in all your reserves of energy. 
Against the background of such facts, one can dis- 
cern the real significance of the two views of life 
we find current in the world to-day. Here is a poet 
who accepts as true the drab interpretation of exist- 
ence offered by the materialist. 


A little while when I am gone 

My life will live in music after me, 

As spun foam lifted and borne on 

After the wave is lost in the full sea. 
Awhile these nights and days will burn 

In song, with the brief frailty of foam, 
Living in light before they turn 

Back to the nothingness that is their home. 


248 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


Suppose you make that your estimate of your life 
and your value to the universe. A bit of foam— 
flung up for a moment as the winds of fate sweep 
across the surges of inert and purposeless matter. 
An instant of rainbow radiance—the glory of your 
ephemeral achievement. Then the foam. sinks back 
forever in the wave, and wind and sea sweep on 
blindly as before. Suppose you accept as true that 
interpretation of life and your part in it. You will 
have a hard time bringing into action your spiritual 
reserves! Your inner attitude and your belief about 
- yourself are not adequate for the task. It is as 
though you told the young men in the English labora- 
tory that they were hopeless weaklings, and then 
expected them to reach the record of 140% in their 
test. Now take the other interpretation of life, given 
to the world by Jesus, and dominant in the life and 
thought of thousands of Christians to-day. Steven- 
son, waiting for death on his island in the Pacific, 
phrased it splendidly: 


The embers of the day are red 
Beyond the murky hill: 
The kitchen smokes, the bed 
In the darkling house is spread, 
The great sky darkens overhead, 
And the great woods are shrill. ... 
So far have I been led, 
Lord, by Thy will; 

249 


James Gordon Gilkey 


So far have I followed, Lord, 

And wondered still. 

The breeze from the embalmed land 

Blows sudden toward the shore 

And claps my cottage door... . 

I hear the signal, Lord, I understand. 

The night at Thy command 

Comes. 

I will eat and sleep, and will not question more. 


See what a contribution Christian faith has to make 
to your life! Here is this half-discovered personal- 
ity of yours—part well known, part waiting to be ex- 
plored and put to use. How can you call into action 
the reserves of your self, unite everything in your 
nature for the struggle of the years? Jesus Christ 
can show you the way. Drop these fears and worries. 
Sweep away these secret sins. Forgive, as you want 
God to forgive you. And then accept as true Jesus’ 
interpretation of life. Live on it. Your life—sur- 
rounded by the love and the care and purpose of God. 
Your work—part of an eternal purpose for the 
world. Your future—safe in the hands of the Most 
High. Try that way of living, Jesus’ way. Do you 
know what will happen? All the reserves of your 
personality will be released and surge forward to 
help you. A psychologist would say you had tapped 
a new source of power. A poet of long ago put the 
same truth in the symbolic language of the Orient. 


250 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


“Jesus said: He that drinketh of the water that I 
shall give him shall never thirst. For the water that 
I shall give him shall become in him a well of water, 
springing up into eternal life. If any man thirst, 
let him come unto me and drink!” 


II 


The second source of surplus power in your life 
lies just beyond your personality, but is forever in 
contact with it. This second source of power is the 
thing we call God. How does a modern Christian 
conceive of God? As you stand before me, I realize 
there are two distinct parts to you. There is the 
physical body which I see and touch. It is the most 
obvious thing about you. But, after all, there is 
more to you than a body. Permeating every part of 
your physical organism there is something else, vastly 
more important. It is unseen, to be sure, but it is 
indubitably real. Your spirit, soul, personality, life 
—call it what you will. I cannot localize this second 
element anywhere in your body. I can only say it 
permeates every part of you. I find it working 
through your hands and your mind to create material 
objects. I hear it revealing its desires through the 
words you speak. I see it slowly and persistently 
displaying its own inner nature in the kind of a life 

pail 


James Gordon Gilkey 


it impels you to live. Invisible and intangible—but 
how real! So real that its disappearance causes the 
greatest change imaginable in your physical organ- 
ism. The change we call death. What is true of 
you as an individual seems equally true of the great 
universe around us all. The most obvious things in 
that universe are the physical objects that make their 
instant appeal to our senses. But the more we think 
about this universe, the harder it becomes to explain 
and understand it if we conclude there is nothing 
here but an indiscriminate welter of objects to be 
felt and touched and seen. A more reasonable theory 
is that a World Personality, a Cosmic Soul, a Creative 
Intelligence permeates it all, just as your tiny per- 
sonality permeates your little body. We cannot lo- 
calize this Spirit-of-the-Universe, but day by day we 
can see this Spirit active about us. Working through 
the forces of the natural world to create material 
things. Speaking to us through beauty and inner 
ideals, through the appeal of the prophet or the cry 
of suffering humanity. Revealing its own ultimate 
purpose and nature in the kind of a world which it is 
slowly creating before the eyes of the generations. 
This is what a modern Christian believes about God. 
God is no strange, erratic Being, localized in some 
isolated and sacred spot, working occasional and mon- 
strous wonders in the physical universe for the bene- 
252 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


fit of a few favorites. Far fromit! He is the Spirit 
permeating all life, working in us and through us and 
beyond us to guide and control an ever-evolving 
world. 


I made a pilgrimage to find the God— 

I listened for His voice at holy tombs, 
Searched for the print of His immortal feet 

In dust of broken altars, yet turned back 

With empty heart. But on the homeward road 
A great light came upon me... and I heard 
The God’s voice singing in a nesting lark, 

Felt His sweet wonder in a swaying rose, 
Received His blessing from a wayside well, 
Looked on His beauty in a lover’s face, 

Saw His bright hand send signals from the sun! 


One who grasps this new conception of God will 
be able to understand why we think of Him as a 
second source of power in human life. This World- 
Spirit lies just beyond our tiny human spirits. They 
open onto Him, as a hundred streams and inlets and 
bays along the seaboard open onto the vastness of. 
the deep. Press into the depths of your own nature, 
and the first thing you meet is your own undiscovered 
self. Press beyond that, past the boundary of indi- 
vidual life, through the doorway that separates your 
personality from the totality of life, and what do 
you meet? You meet the beginning of the vastness 
of God. You say all this is imaginative poetry, reli- 

pars 


James Gordon Gilkey 


gious speculation? Oh, no! Some of the men who 
have meant most to science have finally made this 
answer to the riddle of existence. Listen to William 
James. ‘‘Man becomes conscious that his own spirit- 
ual life is coterminous with a More of the same 
quality, which is operative in the universe outside 
him. He can keep in working touch with it, and ina 
fashion get on board of it and save his higher life 
when all his lower being goes to pieces in the wreck.” 
That is the way in which a scientist phrases this great 
conviction. A religious leader puts the same thought 
in glowing figures of speech. Dr. Fosdick writes: 
‘“Where does the restlessness of April have its source? 
Every tree in its discontent hastens to make buds 
into leaves. Every blade of grass is tremulous with 
impatient life. No tree, however, is a sufficient ex- 
planation of its own haste and dissatisfaction. No 
flower has in itself the secrets of its own eager 
growth. The Spirit of Life is abroad once more, and 
crowding itself everywhere on dead forms makes them 
bloom again. We too are confronted throughout our 
years with an Eternal Life that strives to express 
itself through us. We can never escape from this 
Ever-Present God. Every time we open an inspiring 
book His spirit is pleading for entrance into our 
hearts. Every time we pray He stands at the door 
and knocks. Every time some great cause demand- 


254 


Sources of Surplus Power in Human Life 


ing sacrifice lays its claim upon us, this God is plead- 
ing to be let into our lives. Our hunger for food, our 
love for family and friends are no more direct and 
tangible and immediate experiences than these deal- 
ings with the Eternal Spirit.” Sources of surplus 
power? You have only begun to draw upon them 
when you utilize what lies within your human self. 
Beyond your human resources lie the resources of 
God. As the harbors and inlets merge silently and 
secretly—somewhere—into the great deep. How 
much can God do? “My ways are higher than your 
ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” The 
deep stretches out . . . who knows how far? 

How can you draw help from God? This is the 
ultimate question in religion, and Jesus gave a very 
daring answer. Jesus insisted that we can get God’s 
help without any pleading, any teasing, any bribing 
through rich gifts or sumptuous offerings or reiter- 
ated petitions. If you want God’s help all you have 
to do is start living at your best and ask for it. In- 
stantly God responds—no matter who you are, where 
you are, what you have been in the past, or what 
you need for the future. ‘‘Every one that asketh 
receiveth. Every one that seeketh findeth. To every 
one that knocketh it shall be opened.” Have you 
enough confidence in Jesus to believe Him on that 
point? If you have, everything in your life will 


255 


James Gordon Gilkey 


begin to change. You will begin to draw on your 
own hidden powers. And beyond them on the re- 
sources of the Spirit of Life Itself. Here is the good 
news Jesus tried to bring. We do not have to fight 
the battle unaided. God is here too, with all His 
help. Waiting for only one thing. For us to say: 
“Come!” 


Out of the vastness that is God | 
IT summon the power to heal me: 
It comes . . . with peace ineffable 
And patience, to anneal me. 

Out of the vastness that is God 

IT summon the power to still me: 

It comes . . . from inner depths divine 
With destinies that thrill me. 

Out of the vastness that is God 

I summon the strength to keep me, 
And from all fleshly ills that fret 

With spirit winds to sweep me: 

Ajar I set my soul-doors 

Toward unbounded life... 

And lo, infinitudes of power 

Flow through me, vigor-rife! 


256 





KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE 


Dr. Jenkins was born in Kansas City in 1869, and for many 
years has been pastor of the Linwood Boulevard Christian 
Church in his native city, and one of its distinguished citizens. 
He was educated at Bethany College and Harvard University, 
and entered the ministry of the Church of the Disciples at 
Indianapolis. Later he became president of the University of 
Indianapolis, and still later of Kentucky University. Until 
recently he held what he called ‘‘a double-barreled job” as 
editor and publisher of the Kansas City Post, while still serv- 
ing a great church. He has published many books of sermons, 
essays, and stories, such as The Man in the Street and Re- 
ligion, The Protestant, Facing the Hindenburg Line, and 
Princess Salome. He unites in an unusual manner qualities 
not often found together, the scholar and the orator, the man 
of affairs and the man of the spirit, the philosopher and the 
poet. The present sermon shows him dealing with a large 
theme, using vivid colors with deft stroke, direct in his thought 
and winning in his appeal—refuting the pessimism and futili- 
tarianism of the day. 





KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE 


BURRIS A. JENKINS, D.D. 
LINWOOD CHRISTIAN CHURCH, KANSAS CITY 


“Now learn a parable of the fig tree: When his branch is 
yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is 
nigh: so likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know 
that it is near, even at the doors.” Matt. 24: 32, 33. 


To-day is the mid-most day of June; and June 
is the topmost month of the year. On this continent 
June corresponds to the time when in the East the 
fig tree has put forth its full and perfect leaf. So 
when Jesus says in the twenty-fourth of Matthew: 
“Now from the fig tree learn a parable: when his 
branches now become tender, and putteth forth 
leaves, we know that the summer is nigh,” He is talk- 
ing of the season corresponding to mid-June. 

James Whitcomb Riley, from whom the title of 
this sermon is borrowed, has a homely rural poem 
which goes to the heart of every one reared on a 
farm on the American Continent. 

Tell you what I like the best— 
"Long about knee-deep in June, 
"Bout the time strawberries melts 
On the vines—some afternoon 


Like to jes’ git out and rest, 
And not work at nothin’ else! 


250 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


Orchard’s where I’ ruther be— 
Needn’t fence it in for me! 
Jes’ the whole sky overhead 
And the whole airth underneath— 
Sorto’ so’s a man kin breathe 
Like he ort, and kindo’ has 
Elbow-room to keerlessly 
Sprawl out len’thways on the grass— 


Then he draws the vivid picture of June on the 
farm. The bluebird’s nest, the old apple tree, swal- 
lows skimming and bob-whites whistling, the chicken- 
hawk high overhead and the hen gathering her brood 
under her wing. He tells how lazy one can be, with 
his straw hat across his eyes, peering up through it 
at the skies with clouds of gold and white and blue. 
He sums up by declaring that March holds “nothin’ 
new,” April’s altogether too “brash” for him, and 
May fickle with its hints of sunshine and a lonely 
bird or two. 


Drap asleep, and it turns in 

’For daylight and snows agin!— 

But when June comes—Clear my throat 
With wild honey! Rench my hair 

In the dew! and hold my coat! 
‘Whoop out loud! and throw my hat!— 
June wants me, and I’m to spare! 
Spread them shadders anywhere, 
I'll git down and waller there, 

And obleeged to you at that! 


260 


Knee-deep in June 


The poem is as homespun as Burns. That last 
stanza holds a thrill as deep, though not so sad, as 
almost anything in the works of the Scotch plowman 
poet. 

If, however, Riley is not sufficiently dignified and 
elegant for some minds, then turn to Lowell in the 
“Vision of Sir Launfal.”’ Itseems that only American 
poets sing the glories of June in this fashion, perhaps 
because June is, in this land, the most satisfying of 
all the twelve months. 


And what is so rare as a day in June? 
Then, if ever, come perfect days; 
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, 
And over it softly her warm ear lays; 
Whether we look, or whether we listen, 
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; 
Every clod feels a stir of might, 
An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 
And, groping blindly above it for light, 
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers. 


Neither of these poems, nor for the matter of that 
both of them, go much beyond the little parable of 
the fig-tree which our Master puts into but a sen- 
tence or two. June is the month of leaves, but not 
of fruit, of foliage, but not yet of harvest. It is the 
month of hope, expectancy, even assurance, but it 
is not yet the time of full realization. And this is 
what Jesus means, it would appear, by His little 

261 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


thumb-nail sketch of the fig tree with its big broad 
leaves. The promise of the fruit is undoubtedly 
there, but the ripe figs are not yet ready to gather. 
Whoever refuses to see in the broad leaves of the 
fig tree the assurance of the coming fruitage is blind 
to the signs of the times and loses the brightest an- 
ticipation of the year. June is the greenest month. 
Then the trees are at their best, most gloriously clad, 
before yet the caterpillars and the blight have begun 
to get in their work of destruction, and before yet 
the drouth and blistering heat of mid-summer have 
shriveled and curled the luxuriant vegetation. 

“‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious 
summer."’ Now when the wheat is knee-high may 
we be assured that it will soon be waist-high, turn 
golden, and, falling before the reaper, lie bound in 
bundles in long wind-rows. Now do we know that 
the knee-high corn will soon be above our heads, 
tasseled, and while rustling and shivering in the hot 
mid-summer wind, be rapidly ripening to its silken 
perfection. What does all this mean except a cycle 
of renewed growth, expansion, development? And 
what does Jesus mean, except the coming of the Son 
of Man in a progress that human eyes ought to be 
able to see and to understand. 

No doubt Dean Inge of St. Paul’s is entirely cor- 
rect when he states that such a thing as progress is 

262 


Knee-deep in June 


impossible to conceive when we think of the entire 
universe. Change, the alteration of atoms, the fusion 
oi star dust, the cooling of worlds, the rise of vege- 
tation and of animal life and then perhaps its gradual 
extinction on this, that, or the other planet—all this 
is conceivable, but may or may not be progress. 
Nevertheless, so far as the human race is concerned— 
and that after all is the thing in which we are inter- 
ested—man has got hold of the idea of growth, 
development, evolution, and the idea has got hold of 
him. To many minds, like that of G. Stanley Hall, 
who is typical of hundreds of others, the idea of 
such an evolution or progress is nothing less than 
an inspiration which illuminates all the phases of 
thought. Certainly there can be no shadow of doubt 
that in all the intellectual life of our day the belief 
in progress, in an end and aim and purpose in the 
world and in human affairs, is the touch-stone by 
which everything is tested. 

Jesus seems to put the seal of His approval upon 
this attitude. He apparently wishes to convey the 
impression that His coming is not only gradual but 
perceptible. This is not to say that He anticipates 
the modern doctrine of evolution. No one can claim 
that Christ is an evolutionist. Never at any time 
in His teaching is He concerned with scientific or 
historical facts. It may be claimed, however, that 


2603 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


His ideas are entirely in harmony with the conception 
of growth, development, which we have come to term 
evolution. Moreover St. Paul, in his address at 
Mars Hill hints at the “increasing purpose” that runs 
through the affairs of the world and of men. In 
his epistles, too, more than once he indicates a prep- 
aration in history for “the fullness of the times.” 
This is not to claim that Paul was an evolutionist; 
but it is to claim that sacred scripture has caught 
fore-gleams of this modern scientific doctrine. 
Certain it is that religious teachers of to-day are 
depriving themselves of a very great source of light 
and strength if they reject the hypothesis of evolu- 
tion. It is an extremely convenient and illuminating 
method of reasoning concerning history and the af- 
fairs of humanity, just as well as concerning rocks 
and animal life. To deny oneself of it is to be thrown 
back upon such conceptions as that of a visible, cor- 
poreal, and sudden second coming of Christ, which 
He certainly does not teach in such passages as this 
little parable of the fig tree. He insists that we ought 
to be able to see the signs of His coming—to read the 
signs of the times. Of course there are many who 
have professed to read such signs in wars and rumors 
of wars; but it seems that like the poor we have these 
always with us. How much more clarifying it is to 


our vision to be able to point with certainty to the 5 


264 





Knee-deep in June 


luxurious June leaves of Christ’s visible presence in 
the affairs of this world as they go forward in a steady 
stream of development. 

To be sure if one insists upon holding that hu- 
manity is only about six thousand years old upon 
this planet, he will not be able to read such signs 
of the times into the affairs of men. It is to be freely 
admitted that we have not grown much in six thou- 
sand years. The difference between Moses, for ex- 
ample, and George Washington is scarcely apprecia- 
ble. The contrast between Abraham, the father of 
the faithful, and Abraham Lincoln, the father of a 
race of freed men, is not so glaring as to command 
instant acceptance and appreciation. Perhaps there 
is not a long step forward from Socrates or Confucius 
to Emmanuel Kant or William James. Moreover, 
it is only by humanity and human character that we 
are to judge progress, not by the things with which 
man has surrounded himself. It is easy enough to 
point to steam engines, electric lights, telephones, 
airplanes, and radio to prove that the world has 
grown; but when you have pointed to them you have 
proved nothing. It is only character that counts. 
You must prove that man has grown and that cannot 
be proven within the span of six thousand years. 

If, however, you are able to admit that man has 
been upon this planet hundreds of thousands of years 


265 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


or, for aught we know, five hundred million years, 
then you have something to go on. From the caye 
man living in the rocks, cowering from the beasts of 
the forest, just beginning dimly to perceive the value 
of a club or of a stone in his struggle for life, to the 
civilized man of to-day living comfortably and safely 
in artificially heated and cooled houses with a steady 
and uninterrupted supply of provision and with most 
of his efforts given to intellectual and even artistic 
pursuits—this is indeed a far cry. Here is growth 
beyond all doubt. Here is the luxuriant vegetation 
of the June of human history. Here are indubitable 
signs of the times. 


A fire mist and a planet, 
A crystal and a cell, 
A jelly-fish and a saurian, 
And a cave where the cavemen dwell; 
Then a sense of law and of beauty, 
A face turned from the clod; 
Some call it evolution, and others call it God. 


It is quite possible, nevertheless, taking humanity 
not as individuals but in the large, to observe even 
in the last two thousand years the growth of the fig 
tree leaf, the proof of the parable of Christ. As a 
heritage of the entire race knowledge has grown and 
is growing greatly. There is much more absorption. 
in things of the mind, which of course means things 


2600 


Knee-deep in June 


of the spirit, wherever Christ has gone than there 
was before He came into the world. And Principal 
Jacks sees in education almost a religion, for the im- 
mediate future. 

The other day I was riding all day on a west- 
bound train reading The Life and Confessions of a 
Psychologist, by G. Stanley Hall. In the late after- 
noon I stepped into the smoking compartment and 
was soon followed by the Negro porter. Six feet and 
an inch tall and splendidly proportioned, black as 
broadcloth, with a little mustache, he stood a moment 
and then said: 

“Td like to read that book in your berth, sir.” 

Astonished, I turned on him and began asking 
him questions. 

“Have you read psychology?” 

“Yes, sir. Majored in it at the university.” 

“What university?” 

“Howard University, Washington, D. C.” 

“Did you graduate?” 

“Yes, sir. Degree of A.B.” 

“What are you going to do now?” 

“Just waiting to get money enough ahead to go 
on to medical college.” 

He went backward under the rapid fire of my 
questions and sat down, which possibly a porter is 
not expected to do in the smoking room and in the 


267 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


presence of ‘‘gentlemen.” Recognizing him, how- 
ever, as a brother in the great fraternity of scholars 
to which I have long humbly aspired to belong, I 
promptly took my seat beside him, and we had a 
very pleasant conversation about his prospects. 
Surely, though still a hewer of wood and drawer of 
water, there is some advance between his ancestry 
of a few hundred years ago on the Congo and him. 
Here is growth, development, emergence from the 
material into the spiritual. And what shall be said 
about our own ancestry who within two thousand — 
years used to drink blood out of skulls and often — 
freeze to death in the forests of Northern Europe? — 
Probably most of them died in the thirties and the — 
forties; and no doubt a man who attained the age | 
of fifty was an old man indeed. Now we consider — 
that the ripest and most useful time in man’s life — 
is from forty-five to at least sixty-five. We have — 
no statistics for more accurate information concern- | 
ing longevity, so far as our Viking fathers are con- | 
cerned; but the chances are that the fair-haired — 
races of to-day average twenty to thirty years more — 
of life, and that too in the most spiritual period of © 
life, than did their fathers of two thousand years 
ago. Here then is leafage of the spirit, a sign of the © 
coming of the Son of Man. 
In this city lives a man of thirty-five who was 
268 


Knee-deep in June 


cited by General Pershing in the Chateau-Thierry 
sector for making maps of the salient behind the 
German lines. He was Major Roberts then; he is 
plain Mr. Roberts now, grubbing with a trowel in 
the garden of his little home. He made the maps 
by calculating angles by the stars. Everybody said 
that it could not be done, but he did the impossible. 
He has made five thousand such maps, putting in the 
altitudes of mountains and hills without traveling 
over the ground. He is just waiting to start next 
winter with a scientific expedition to the wild heart of 
North Mongolia to make a map of all that undis- 
covered country. Just a few days ago he had to 
cable the British Government refusing to go to the 
upper waters of the Orinoco upon a similar expedi- 
tion. He will be in Mongolia from three to five years. 
Meanwhile, with his wife and baby, he lives in a 
modest little cottage and grubs in a garden with a 
hand tool. Is he not almost a million years in ad- 
vance of King Canute or even Richard of the lion 
heart? Knowledge is power. Says Tennyson: 


Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell, 
That mind and soul according well 

May make one music as before, 

But vaster! 


So one might go on citing instances of purely in- 
269 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


tellectual evolution, but what shall be said about 
even more spiritual concerns? Man is not afraid of 
God or the gods as he was two thousand years ago. 
Man is tentatively beginning to love God and to com- 
prehend that God-is not Fear but God is Love. The 
fig tree leaves of a fuller and richer comprehension 
of the Almighty and the eternal are growing apace; 
and the June of man’s affection for his Eternal Father 
is coming on with man’s increasing confidence in 
Christ. We begin to understand that what Christ — 
was that God is. 
Such increased sense of the Father of our human ~ 
family is drawing us closer to each other. We value : 
human life, human welfare, and human happiness 
far more than we used to do. It is no longer con- — 
sidered just the thing to walk over one another in — 
the gaining of selfish ends and aims. Dimly we are — 
beginning to discern that the same attitudes which : 
we assume in family life we should also put into ' 
practice in the larger relationships, social, business, : 
political, and international. { 
Some thirty years ago or so a senator from Kan- — 
sas declared that the Golden Rule had no place in ‘i 
business or politics. That senator was retired at the ' 
next election, possibly not exclusively for that utter- — 
ance, but one cannot help believing largely on ac- © 
count of it. It was not that the people of Kansas — 
270 : 





Knee-deep in June 


were putting the Golden Rule noticeably into politics 
or business at that time; but it was because they 
had a sneaking notion that they ought to do so; 
and they didn’t like for their senator to say that it 
was impossible. Now all over Kansas and all over 
this country Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, Codpera- 
tive Clubs, and a dozen other varieties of circular 
clubs are preaching day in and day out that the 
Golden Rule as well as all the other precepts of 
Christ are not only ideal but practicable in business 
affairs, are indeed the best possible business. 

In Cincinnati is the largest clothing manufacturer 
perhaps in the world—Arthur Nash. His business 
is founded on the Golden Rule. Investigated by the 
Federal Council of Churches and by the American 
Federation of Labor, there were only a few super- 
ficial faults that could be found in his administration. 
He never has a strike; his people are part owners 
of the concern and are the most highly paid work- 
men in the garment business. The last time I saw 
Arthur Nash, he said to me: “Doctor, my worst fear 
is that I shall be a millionaire in spite of myself and 
I don’t want to be a millionaire.”” The other day 
the papers carried a story to the effect that the Nash 
Clothing Company had declared a one hundred per- 
cent dividend, and Arthur Nash would have become 
a millionaire at once had he not parceled out his 


wih 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


share of the dividend amongst the other employees. 
Here is the coming of the Son of Man. Have we 
eyes to read the signs of the times? 

Has it ever been your strange experience to sit — 
in a boat before daylight or just at dawn on a mist- 
beclouded river or ocean and try to locate sounds 
and voices coming to you over the water? Perhaps 
you heard the rattle of oars in row-locks or the { 
flapping of sails or the siren of a tug, and yet you ; 
could not see a thing; and you had the feeling that 
you were totally deceived in the direction in which © 
sounds were coming. Mysterious, eerie, altogether : 
fearsome, is such an experience on fog-covered j 
waters. One such morning on the flagship of an { 
American fleet of destroyers out of Brest Harbor 
we let go a convoy of transports carrying wounded — 
men home and lay by to pick another convoy bring-— 
ing fresh troops from America. We knew that in_ 
that coming convoy, somewhere out there in mid- 1 
ocean, was ‘“‘La France,” one of the biggest ships on j 
the seas, and the pride of the French Merchant Ma- 
rine. How the American sailors ever hoped to sight 
that convoy in that darkest hour which came just 
before the dawn, made still darker by the mistiness 
of the morning, was beyond my comprehension. Yet 
the commander waved his hand to the shrouds over 
his head and said: “Listen for that young fellow on i 

272 q 


| 
j 





















Knee-deep in June 


the starboard lookout.”” Sure enough by and by rang 
out a young voice crying, “‘Ship ahoy!”’ 

“Where away?” 

“Off the starboard bow!” 

It was twenty minutes before I could descry at all 
the black smudges of the convoys on the horizon. 

On another morning two thousand years ago a 
little group of fishing men were out in a boat in the 
misty darkness. Not only was the surface of the 
water dark, but the horizons of their hearts were 
black with hopelessness and despair. Nearly three 
years they had pinned their faith and all their earthly 
hope to One who had just died ignominiously the 
death of a felon on a cross. A man had buried him 
and Rome had put a seal on his tomb. All the hope 
of these fishermen now lay shattered and their dreams 
of a kingdom were only fragments and shards. One 
said: “I go a-fishing.”” And they all went. Suddenly 
out of the darkness, out of the mists and blackness 
in their souls, there loomed a presence. It was their 
very Lord, risen and come back to them. They 
said afterwards that He walked to them on the 
water. No wonder they thought so. Something 
turned them from darkness to hope, from the black- 
ness of night to the dawn of even a greater day than 
they had ever dreamed. Beside this a mere walking 
on water by a man is an insignificant occurrence. 


273 


Burris A. Jenkins, D.D. 


From this time forward Christ walked on the tide 
of all their life, as He has walked steadily forward 
on all the rivers, lakes, and oceans of the world. 
He said He would come a second time and He has 
already come. He is constantly coming with a won- 
derful and beautiful evolution, yes, even a revolution 
in the thoughts of men, in the lives of men, in the 
spirits of men. Can we not see him coming in the 
glory of the June morning and do our hearts not 
leap up to meet him? 


274 





THE REALISM AND IDEALISM OF LIFE 


Swing, Hillis, Gunsaulus—it is a shining tradition in which 
Dr. Shannon stands in the pulpit of Central Church, Chicago; 
and he ably maintains it by virtue of qualities akin to those of 
his predecessors, as well as by an insight and art all his own, 
speaking to a goodly company in Orchestra Hall, and an enor- 
mous radio audience besides. Born on a farm in Kansas, edu- 
cated in Webb School, Bell Buckle, Tenn., and at Harvard Uni- 
versity, Dr. Shannon entered the Methodist ministry in 1889, 
his chief pastorate being at Grace Church, Brooklyn. Six years 
later he became pastor of the Reformed Church on Brooklyn 
Heights, and went to Chicago in 1920. An outstanding figure 
among the younger men of the American pulpit, he may be 
said to belong to the Gunsaulus-Hillis school of preaching— 
picturesque, imaginative, richly rhetorical, at times gorgeously 
colorful. In his earlier books, such as The Soul’s Atlas and 
The Enchanted Universe, his fancy sometimes ran riot in a 
tropical profusion of imagery: if in his later sermons, like The 
Economic Eden or The Infinite Artist, it is more subdued and 
disciplined, it is only the decorative exuberance with which an 
authentic messenger clothes a penetrating insight into spiritual 
reality and the problems of human life and destiny. Dr. 
Shannon is now in the full tide of a ministry in which men of 
every faith have a right to an honorable pride and promise. 





THE REALISM AND IDEALISM OF LIFE 


FREDERICK F. SHANNON 
CENTRAL CHURCH, CHICAGO 


“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Matt. 
27: 46. 

“Go unto my brethren and say to them, I ascend unto my 
Father and your Father, and my God and your God.” John 
201 17: 


My subject is the realism and idealism of life, 
as interpreted by the words and experience of the 
Lord Christ. Our first text is shot through with 
such solemnity that one hesitates to pronounce it. 
It appears originally in the Twenty-second Psalm, 
which contains, according to Tertullian, “the whole 
Passion of Christ.” Yet, uttered by our Lord in 
His dying hour, the words are invested with a hush 
of wonder and majesty which cause sensitive souls 
to repeat them with becoming reluctance. They 
seem to voice what we may venture to call the 
realism of life. The second text are the words of 
the Master to Mary Magdalene in the Garden on 
that first Easter morning. By way of contrast, and 
in the light of Christ’s triumph over sin, death, and 
the grave, they define, in a large and glorious fashion, 

Py | 


Frederick F. Shannon 


the idealism of life. At any rate, setting the two pas- 
sages with their unfathomable experiences together, 
we have what I like to call: The story of the God- 
Man against the universe, and of His final vindica- 
tion by the universe which apparently forsook Him. 


I 


Consider the realism of life. “My God, My God, 
why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Here is realism in- 
deed—realism drenched with the darkest rain that 
ever fell from life’s midnight skies. More terrible 
than philosophic pessimism, more awful than scien- 
tific agnosticism, more oppressive than all skeptical 
speculations whatsoever, this experience of the pro- 
foundest Soul ever housed in flesh bids one pause 
and ponder. I can endure Omar’s cynicism, and 
Nietzsche’s ravings, and Schopenhauer’s despair. 
Each saw only a fragment of life and misinterpreted 
even that. But what shall we say in the presence 
of the sanest, deepest, wisest, and best, when He, 
too, seemingly finds a universe bereft of its God? 
This, surely, is enough to make one shudder. ‘This, 
I say, is the climax of despair, but it is not all there 
is. Other factors are present also. Before the climax 
can be fully appreciated, these must be mane 
weighed. 

278 


The Realism and Idealism of Life 


Jesus was forsaken by His friends. Let us con- 
fess that the way Jesus wooed and won those fisher- 
men and artisans is one of the supreme romances of 
the soul. He found them dull, unresponsive, disre- 
garded by the social circles of the period. But 
behold Him working them over! No sculptor ever 
gave such attention to his marble; no painter ever 
dreamed of his canvas; no poet ever brooded over 
his songs; no architect ever studied his designs; no 
gardener ever caressed his flowers; no young mother 
ever leaned over the face of her sleeping babe—none 
ever gave his being to matter or mind as Jesus gave 
Himself to those first disciples. Little by little did 
they realize and own His irresistible spell. As the 
buried root finally signals to the sun with banners 
of beauty, so, at last, did James and John and 
Peter and the others come forth from their dungeons 
of flesh and view the mountains of divine grandeur 
towering above them in the Christ of God. 

And Peter! Why, did not Peter—the imperfect 
and the impetuous—feel the quickening tides of hero- 
ism run so deep and strong in his soul that, when 
the Master suggested they would all be offended in 
Him—did not Peter declare: “‘Even if I must die with 
Thee, yet will I not deny Thee’? Oh, Peter, what 
a human brother you are—bone of our bone, flesh 
of our flesh! A few hours later when Peter, James, 


279 


Frederick F. Shannon 


and John are told off by the Master to be nearest 
Him in His agony, they are one and all overcome, not 
by death, but by sleep! Moreover, when the mob, 
guided by Judas, comes to take the Master in the 
garden, we read: -“‘Then all the disciples forsook 
Him and fled.” Jesus was forsaken by His friends; 
even the inner circle melted away before the raging 
fires of iniquity that swept the olive orchard through! 
Jesus was forsaken by Religion. ‘Now the chief 
priests and the whole council sought false witnesses 
against Jesus, that they might put Him to death.” 
Talk about realism! If you care to see realism in 
its blackest expression, realism uttering itself in un- 
speakable diabolism, I commend to you that ex-chief 
priest, Annas, and his crafty son-in-law, Caiaphas, 
the reigning high priest. For ours is a world in which 
not only development is at work, but degeneration 
also. The Jewish religion, in its purer, fairer forms, 
had fallen from the heights and been picked up by 
the defiled hands of Annas, Caiaphas, and their un- 
holy conspirators. Surely this is one of the horrible 
facts of history: Sometimes the holiest is seized 
upon by the most hellish, which keeps a temporary 
upper hand. Then do men look up and _ behold 
heavens of iron; look out and behold horizons of 
gloom; look down and behold soundless seas of 
SOITOW. | 


280 


The Realism and Idealism of Life 


As a flashlight turned upon those two spots of 
humanized darkness, Annas and Caiaphas, consider 
the law governing witnesses in the Sanhedrin. In 
the first place, the witness for the defense was first ex- 
amined; in the second place, a corroborating witness 
was required before the testimony of the first witness 
became legal. Essentially, it was a wise law; its 
aim was to guarantee justice to all appearing before 
that august tribunal. But what have we in the case 
of Jesus? This: “Now the chief priests and the 
whole council sought false witnesses against Jesus, 
that they might put Him to death.” Even religion 
—the holiest, cleanest, deepest power God implants 
in the human soul—forsook Jesus, and took refuge in 
hearts of hatred and minds of malice. 

We sometimes compare the last hours of Socrates 
with those of Christ. The immortal Greek surely 
behaved himself with heroism and nobility. The 
grandeur of Socrates reveals, in contrast, the mean- 
ness of his judges. But the difference, my friends, 
in the trial of Socrates and the trial of Christ is this: 
It is just the immeasurable difference between the 
philosopher and the Saviour. If you fail to see it, 
no argument of mine will convince you. It is not 
a matter that can be decided by argument. UlIti- 
mately, it is the reaction of our own souls to that 
which is secondary and that which is supreme. 


281 


Frederick F. Shannon 


When a man says that Socrates and Christ belong | 
in the same category, he is properly judging neither, 
but pronouncing judgment upon himself. And self- 
judgment, next to the judgment of the wise, good 
God, is the most searching judgment the moral uni- 
verse can show. Forsaken by the religion of his ; 
own nation, I can easily imagine Socrates, in a uni-— 
verse like this, carrying his case to the Supreme Court 
of the Christ. Likewise forsaken by the religion of © 
His own nation, by no stretch of the imagination 
could I picture Jesus, in a universe such as ours, car- 
rying His wrongs to a tribunal occupied by Socrates. 
“For neither doth the Father judge any man,” says i 
Jesus, ‘but He hath given all judgment unto the 
Son; that all may honor the Son even as they honor 
the Father. He that honoreth not the Son honoreth 
not the Father that sent Him.” Imagine Socrates 
speaking these words! He would have brought upon — 
himself centuries of philosophic laughter. But Jesus” 
speaks them, and the Soul of the Universe, as well — 
as Christianized human consciousness, utters its 
grand Amen! Verily, religion was horribly unjust 
to itself when it forsook Jesus that night two thou- 
sand years ago. i 

Jesus was forsaken by Law. “And the same day 
Pilate and Herod were made friends together: for 
before they were at enmity between themselves.” 


282 


The Realism and Idealism of Life 


Did evil ever lift its sinister face and wear a more 
wicked smile than upon that day when Pilate and 
Herod, separated by fires of hatred, are drawn to- 
gether in their mutual antagonism to Christ? Yet, 
strange as it is, it is by no means uncommon in life. 
Let two bad men, avowed enemies, be confronted by 
one good man, and the two bad men, by a kind of 
moral gravitation, will be pulled toward each other 
rather than toward the man in whom goodness lives. 
So Pilate and Herod, the right and left arms of what 
we call law and order, found in Jesus, the incarnation 
of justice and truth, a common ground upon which 
they might stand and reunite the broken ties of a 
wicked friendship. For one brief moment Pilate, 
alone with Jesus—‘‘always with that high look of 
Godlike calm’’—and wrought upon by His nameless 
power, seems to see a tiny flame of goodness flaring 
up amid the burned-out cinders of his ruined soul. 
Guided by that feeble, flickering light, he came out 
and said to the Jews: ‘I find no crime in Him.” And 
yet Pilate scourged Him, allowed his soldiers to crown 
Him with thorns, mock Him, and smite Him. Like- 
wise, Herod and his soldiers mocked Him, dressed 
Him in gorgeous robes of derision, and shunted Him 
about as if He were a common criminal. 

Yet, forsaken by Friendship and Religion and Law, 
does not Jesus reach the acme of forsakenness as re- 


283 


Frederick F. Shannon 

vealed in His question on the Cross: ““My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In a swiftly 
darkening world order He seems to be finally en- 
closed by impenetrable darkness. Has the God 
whose will it was His delight always to do—has 
He, too, forsaken Him? Has the Father whose deeds 
of mercy He had joyfully performed—has He given 
up His Son to the unmerciful? It is one of the dark- 
est, most mysterious moments in the whole history 
of mind. Perhaps, after all, it is not unthinkable 
that the disciples should forsake Him. ‘The spirit 
is willing, but the flesh is weak. It is horrible, but 
not impossible, for religion to become so perverted 
as to lose its inherent majesty. And law, in the 
course of this world, often loses its way, falling 
among the enemies of order and justice and truth. 
But here, at last, is the question that crushes the 
Son of Man: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?” 

Now, what I want to know is this: Will God an- 
swer the question? Verily, He will! He is the only 
Person Who can answer it. And His answer must 
be written in deeds so wonderful that all history, all 
thought, all art, all music, all eloquence, all faith, all 
hope, all love shall spend their being in trying to 
tell how God answers the question of His beloved 
Son upon the Cross. Meantime, we shall have to 


284 


The Realism and Idealism of Life 


journey from the Cross to the Garden; we shall have 
to go in behind the stifling realism of life and behold 
life’s imperishable idealism. 


IT 


Consider, therefore, the idealism of life as it utters 
itself in our second text: “Go unto my brethren and 
say to them, I ascend unto my Father and your 
Father, and my God and your God.” These are 
the words of the Master to Mary as she stood weep- 
ing and worshipful at the entrance of the empty 
tomb. And what words of life are these, deep with 
deathless beauty, alive with the wonder and wisdom 
of Godhood! ‘O woman, with the lily heart and 
the Easter hope, go tell My brethren that I ascend. 
I have descended into the uttermost depths. I have 
found desolate wastes where Friends forsake and 
Religion denies and Law perverts. But I have en- 
dured them all; I have wrung from death the last 
bitter drop within its poisoned being; I have gone 
with the outgoing tides to the uttermost deeps of 
doom. But now the tides have turned. Deep and 
swift and strong they are bearing Me back to the 
Eternal Hills of Home, whence I came here to share 
the lot of immortal seamen, wrecked upon the coasts 
of time. Yea, Mary, weep not. Go to My brethren 

, 285 


Frederick F. Shannon 


—the brethren who forsook Me and fled—go to 
them and say, My God, Who seemed to have for- 
saken Me, hath not suffered His Holy One to see 
corruption, but hath raised Me from the dead and 
led captivity captive.” 

Oh, yes, there is plenty of realism in life. But 
there is more—there is deathless and undefeatable 
idealism. Do you say that His friends forsook 
Jesus? Well, but consider this: Those disciples, at 
that particular period of their development, did not 
spell out the full significance of friendship. Look 
at them later, after they have journeyed to the © 
world’s end under the budding skies of that Friend- 
ship Divine! You will find nothing grander in his- 
tory than the way those first men and women re- 
sponded to the pull of Christ from within the worlds 
out of sight. Bow your heads in shame at the deny- 
ing, swearing Peter, remembering that we, too, have 
presented just as abject spectacles of failure. But, 
oh! do not forget that other Peter—the Peter of 
the unpublished Easter morning talk with his Lord; 
the Peter of Pentecost; the Peter of the cross, cruci- 
fied head downward; the Peter of the Christian cen- 
turies who, just because of his mixture of weakness 
and strength, has brought hope to the struggling 
millions in their fight to win their souls for God and 
truth. See, also, that young Pharisee, persecuting — 


286 


The Realism and Idealism of Life 


to the death those who had found the Way. Behold 
him red-handed, ranging like a wild beast his ways 
of destruction. Employ any figure of speech to 
set forth the desperation of Saul of Tarsus, and you 
will hardly equal the persecutor himself. But lo! 
that blood-thirsty Saul becomes the life-giving, king- 
dom-building Paul. As an exhibition of sheer will- 
power, measured by what he did in influencing cities, 
continents, and civilizations, I can think of no being 
in the known universe capable of mastering Saul of 
Tarsus except the Christ of God. But He did it— 
did it grandly, did it in such wise that the splendor 
of that noonday sun pales before the transfiguring 
light with which the glorified Christ enveloped the 
Apostle to the Gentiles. 

We do wrong in thinking only of our imperfect 
and ungrown friendships. Friendship that could be 
entirely exploited in the fields of time would not 
wear well in the spheres of eternity. After all, we 
are scarcely beyond the embryonic stage in these 
high matters. These October days have spread a 
magic across the land. It steals not alone into the 
dreamful faces of humans, but it seems to stir our 
little friends, the caterpillars, to unwonted activity. 
They are in the grass, in the roadways, even upon 
the doorsteps. Out there on Michigan Avenue, this 
morning as I was going north, I met one of these 


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Frederick F. Shannon 


prophet-creatures coming south. Pausing, I said: 
“Good morning, Mr. Caterpillar. Whither bound?” 
He was so absorbed in the business of creeping that 
he scarcely deigned to answer me. But as he kept 
creeping—creeping—creeping, he looked back and 
said: ‘Why, Man, I’m on my way to get my wings. 
Don’t bother me.” I laughed and at once took my 
seat among the scornful. ‘Your wings?” I rejoined. 
“What on earth have you to do with wings?” “What 
have I to do with wings?” he answered, creeping— 
creeping—creeping along. “Why, I have wings in- 
side of me this very moment. I’m going to unpack 
them one of these days. Come around next June 
and I will show you my wings instead of this worm.” 
And are we not all embryonic humans? We spend 
our years in the valley between dust and divinity. 
Two natures are ever struggling within us. “The 
man of prehistoric times lives on, unchanged, in our 
Unconscious,” says Freud. But never mind! The 
mountain of divinity shall absorb the mountain of 
dust, the two struggling natures within shall be finally 
harmonized, the man of prehistoric times shall be 
changed into the man of times eternal. For God 
will perfect that which concerneth us. And more 


than earth concerns us, more than death and the, 


grave. Smitten with a sick man’s fancy, Coleridge 
wrote Charles Lamb asking forgiveness for some 


288 





The Realism and Idealism of Life 


fancied wrong. Lamb replied in the following post- 
script, which deserves to be immortal: “If you ever 
thought an offense, much more wrote it, against me, 
it must have been in the times of. Noah, and the 
great waters have swept it away. Mary is crying 
for mere love of your letter.” Well, if human friend- 
ship can dress itself in such lovely hues, think it not 
strange that the Divine Friendship shall go on work- 
ing its miracles of grace—now setting the wayward 
feet of a Peter upon solid rock, now turning the dis- 
cordant will of a Saul into the undying love of the 
Paul of Corinthians Thirteen. Thirteen may be an 
unlucky number; but I like to remember that one 
of the transcendent chapters in all literature bears 
the name Thirteen and has also Thirteen incompara- 
ble verses. 

Did you say that Religion forsook the Master? I 
beg your pardon! That was just a slip of the tongue, 
and you must instantly apologize. It was only make- 
believe and petrified hypocrisy, which had become 
temporarily housed in the Sanhedrin, that mis- 
treated the Master. Pure religion and undefiled 
forsake Him? Why, you might as well talk of 
flowers forsaking their stems, of rains forsaking the 
clouds, of sunbeams forsaking the sun. But even in 
that horrible night of realism, consider how the truth 
asserts itself. Go back to the Cross again. Nature 

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Frederick F. Shannon 


seems to be putting on black, as if to hide her face 
from the baseness of men. While priests mock and 
soldiers gamble and mobs sway to and fro, one of 
those two thieves breaks through walls of hate and 
ventures into gardens of faith. ‘‘Jesus,” he cried, as 
the worlds reeled around and within him, ‘remember 
me when thou comest in thy kingdom.” Ponder 
this: When His own friends had temporarily fallen 
away, true Religion steps forth from the soul of a 
criminal, beholds the majesty of our dying Lord, 
and prays for a place in His undying Kingdom. 
Over against the wickedness of high priest and king 
and governor, I like to set the faith of the repentant 
thief. A grain of true faith in Jesus Christ will out- 
weigh mountains of iniquity. Paint your realism 
“black as the pit, from pole to pole,” but, remember, 
it is not the whole, it is not even on speaking terms 
with the permanent and true. For while sin runs 
amuck in high places and truth is ignored in low, 
God will find Him room even in the most unexpected 
house of human nature and gloriously dwell therein. 

Think, too, of Mary Magdalene. You say that 
Religion was struck a hard blow by Annas and 
Caiaphas. I tell you the world-deep devotion of 
Mary Magdalene is bright enough to illumine their 
darkness. Every Gospel tells about Mary. There 
are some facts connected with the Life of Lives re- 

290 


The Realism and Idealtsm of Life 


ported by one Evangelist and omitted by others. 
But Mary—sin-wounded, Christ-forgiven Mary— 
walks through all the Gospels of the Easter morning 
like some royally crowned queen come down from 
the High Hills of God. When the love of God in 
Christ laid hold of Mary, it found a human being 
who could stand by the Cross, weep through the 
night as her woman’s hands prepared the spices of 
love, beat the sun up in the morning, and run over 
the hills of Bethany to catch the first human glimpse 
of the Risen One! Has not Mary become a kind of 
voice for all struggling, aspiring, climbing, falling 
souls the world around? ‘Thus a modern poet has, 
through Mary, uttered a truth that all of us should 
heed: 


O Magdalene, I, too, have known the longing 

To kneel and wash with tears the Saviour’s feet; 
To dry them with my tresses and anoint them 

With blessed myrrh and ointment, rare and sweet. 


But I have not the courage that God gave you; 
I could not bear the wise men’s piercing eyes. 

Before a sneering glance my heart would falter; 
I would deny their scorn with shameful lies. 


And still I go to church each Sunday morning 
And think upon our dear Lord crucified. 
I yearn to kneel before His feet for comfort 
And kiss His hands and touch His wounded side. 
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Frederick F. Shannon 


If I should cry, my burning tears would shame me, 
And those who sit in every near-by row 

Would turn their scornful glances on my sorrow; 
I could not bear to have the whole world know. 


And so I sit a hypocrite, contented 
To know that only God can see my soul. 
O Magdalene, plead well for me in Heaven, 
That Christ may cleanse my heart and make me whole. 


But did not Law forsake Him? Did not the rules 
of civilized society, as reflected by Rome and Jeru- 
salem, break down under the strain of injustice and 
yield up the Christ to wild, insane forces of disorder? 
In answer to these questions, we should do some 
straight, hard thinking. In the first place, the sense 
of law and order did not originate with Memphis, 
Babylon, Athens, Rome, or Jerusalem. The sense 
of order is primarily in the heart and mind of God. 
In behind protoplasm, the physical basis of life, law 
and order are in perfect operation. They are in the 
stellar worlds and in the atomic galaxies, in the 
illimitably great and the infinitely small. Now, is 
the idea of physical order more deeply ingrained 
in the warp and woof things than the idea of moral 
order? In other words, is the physical anterior to 
and superior to the spiritual? It is utterly unthink- 
able! Law and order, let me repeat, did not begin 
with the world, nor can it end with the world. 


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The Realism and Idealism of Life 


In the history of human thought, few men have 
done more to give this idea worthy expression than 
Richard Hooker. He, too, belongs to that marvelous 
sixteenth century. He belongs with your Shake- 
speare and Bacon and Milton and Spenser and Ra- 
leigh. One of the amplest souls that ever lived— 
great in his learning, great in his piety, great in his 
humanness—Hooker combines the best of the an- 
cients and the moderns. Dying at the age of forty- 
seven, when the Fundamentalists of his time were 
misinterpreting the very religion they professed, 
Hooker asked: ‘‘May we cause our faith without 
Reason to appear reasonable in the eyes of men?” 
And then, of this original, uncreated law which holds 
the worlds together, he says, in one of the noblest 
passages in all literature: “Wherefore, that here we 
may briefly end: of law there can be no less acknowl- 
edged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her 
voice the harmony of the world: all things in Heaven 
and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling 
her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her 
power; both angels and men and creatures of what 
condition soever, though each in different sort and 
manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her 
as the mother of their peace and their joy.” More 
than three hundred years ago what did the great 
Hooker say but this: The idea of law did not begin 

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Frederick F. Shannon 


with this world, and, therefore, it cannot end with 
this world. 

In the second place, how can law ultimately for- 
sake its Creator? Those to whom the administration 
of the organized laws of society is entrusted may 
prove unequal to their obligations and privileges. 
But their reign, in the long view, is temporary, brief, 
soon gone. But He—the Divine Original of Law— 
abides forever, and cannot be forsaken by that which 
is the breath of His own being and Godhead. There- 
fore, what an answer does Jesus give to Pilate! Net- 
tled by the Master’s speechful silence, Pilate asked: 
‘“‘Knowest thou not that I have power to release 
thee, and have power to crucify thee?” Calmly 
and with Godlike restraint the Master replied: 
“Thou couldest have no power against me, except 
it were given thee from above.” In short, Cesar, 
Pilate, Herod, Annas, and Caiaphas—all alike were 
even then within the grip of that very Power “from 
above”—the law of God, of Right, of Truth—which 
they were wickedly perverting and against which they 
were vainly contending. 

Forsaken by Law? Oh, no! Our Lord could not 
be forsaken by that which owes its being to Him. 
Men may violate Christ’s law and destroy themselves. 
But that law is indestructible. Indeed, one of the 
most solemn facts of our era for the whole wide world 

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The Realism and Idealism of Life 


is this: By ignoring Christ’s law for individuals and 
nations, mankind may pull down the house of civil- 
ization upon itself. We emphasize the beauty of 
doing that which is right; we must also emphasize the 
horror of doing that which is wrong. We say: “‘What 
a fine thing it would be if all nations could be so 
organized as to outlaw war.” Ah, but we must also 
say: “‘All nations must be so organized, or else war 
shall utterly destroy the nations.” And the genius 
of such an organization must be filled with the Spirit 
of Christ; otherwise it must fall under its own load 
of mechanical ineffectiveness. But whatever men 
and nations do, or refuse to do, set this down as 
inviolable truth: Law cannot forsake the Christ of 
God any more than light can forsake the sun from 
which it streams. He—and He alone— 


He shall lay on souls the power of Peace, 
And send on kingdoms torn the sense of Home, 
More than the fire of Joy that burned on Greece, 
More than the light of Law that rose on Rome. 


Finally, was He not forsaken of God? Did He 
not himself cry from His Hill of Pain: ‘‘My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Here, indeed, 
would we stand in awe upon the verse of mysterious 
realms. The full meaning of these words cannot be 
disclosed. Beyond the powers of thought did the an- 

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Frederick F. Shannon 


guish of our Lord’s vicarious passion fling him forth 
into the dreadful wastes of No Man’s Land of Sin and 
Death. Yet are we absolutely sure that in the dark- 
est moment in the experience of the moral universe, 
He was not forsaken of God. The God Whose Eter- 
nal Son He is; the God from Whose bosom He came; 
the God Whose wisdom He spake; the God Whose 
works He wrought—surely God was well-pleased 
with such a humanized transcript of His own inex- 
haustible self-giving in that hour when both the 
outer and inner suns seemingly refused their light 
to the Saviour of the world. Hunting the universe 
through and waiting the cycles long, God had at last 
found One Who, in the spheres of humanity, could 
perfectly experience and interpret His love to a lost 
world. Forsaken of God? Why, God raised Him 
from the dead and gave unto Him the Name that 
is above every name, whether in hell or earth or 
sky. 

So, it seems to me, does our holy religion introduce 
us to the realism of life. But it does not stop there 
—it goes straight through the dark and terrible real- 
ism into the Heart of Infinite Love wherein our 
white and conquering idealism everlastingly abides. 
Penetrating below all deeps of darkness, it ranges 
beyond all heights of light and love. Upon our own 
Hills of Agony, we, too, sometimes cry: ‘‘Why hast 

296 


The Realism and Idealism of Life 


Thou forsaken Me?” But hard by the Darkening 
Hill is a Garden all golden with the Light of the 
Resurrection Morning. Standing by the entrance of 
life’s empty tombs, we may still hear One say: ‘“‘Go 
unto my brethren and say unto them, I ascend unto 
my Father and your Father, and my God and your 
God.” Oh, is it not the history of One Man standing 
against the universe, only to find the universe swing- 
ing at last over to His side, proclaiming Him King 
of kings and Lord of lords! 


But now Thou art in the Shadowless Land, 
Behind the light of the setting Sun; 
And the worst is forgotten which Evil planned, 
And the best which Love’s glory could win is won. 


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THE NATURE OF RELIGION 


Preacher, pastor, scholar, bookman, poet, Dr. Hough is one 
of the most gifted and influential men in the American pulpit, 
his prodigious studentship only equaled by his personal and 
intellectual charm. Born in Ohio in 1877, educated at Union 
College, Drew Seminary, and New York University, after 
various pastorates in New Jersey, Long Island, Brooklyn and 
Baltimore, he became professor of Historical Theology in 
Garrett Biblical Institute, Evanston; and finally president of 
Northwestern University in 1919. He is now minister of 
Central Methodist Church in Detroit, where he holds a unique 
position of influence in a brilliant city. To name the books 
written by Dr. Hough, from Athanasius, Hero to Synthetic 
Christianity or The Imperial Voice—the last perhaps his best 
volume of sermons—would be to turn this note into a cata- 
Jogue of sermons, essays, stories, poems, lectures on theological 
and philosophical topics, with an appendix devoted to edi- 
torials, dialogues, and patriotic addresses. He is as well and 
widely known in England as in America, made so, first, by his 
mission as lecturer on the moral and spiritual aims of the war 
on the Lindgren foundation of Northwestern University in 
1918, and as holiday preacher at the City Temple the same 
year. He is a most attractive university preacher, as witness 
the following sermon, as much for his mastery of a limpid, 
vivid, musical style—delicate without being dainty, flexible and 
forthright, rich in color cadence—as for his clear insight and 
wise guidance in those pathways by which groping man finds 
his way to the Eternal amid the fogs and illusions of time. 


THE NATURE OF RELIGION 


LYNN HAROLD HOUGH, TH.D., LITT.D. 
CENTRAL METHODIST CHURCH, DETROIT 


“God—hath—spoken to us in his Son.’ Hebrews 1: 1, 2. 


There is a suggestive passage in the Odyssey de- 
scribing the meeting of Hermes and the goddess 
Calypso when Zeus has sent the messenger of the 
gods to require the release of Odysseus: 


But Calypso, goddess bright, 

Failed not to know him, seeing him face to face; 
For never do the Gods’ immortal race 

Fail to know one another when they meet, 
How far soe’er apart their dwelling place. 


That instant recognition of the divine by the di- 
vine is the very heart of religion. It is an immediate 
and authentic consciousness of a world of realities 
and values existing in its own right. 

In a period full of energetic activity and moved by 
all the challenge of the gospel of action it is very 
easy for us to confuse religion with the products 
which flow from it. So religion becomes a program 
of activity, a method of human living, a social syn- 

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Lynn Harold Hough, Th.D., Litt.D. 


thesis. So it becomes the mind in action for produc- 
tive thinking, the heart in action interpreting all 
feeling and beauty, the will in action dominating the 
relations of men. It becomes the moral and spiritual 
and esthetic conscience of men. All this is splendidly 
wholesome when it is seen as the fruit of religion 
rather than its seed, the harvest of religion rather 
than its root. But all of this is likely to become 
cold and barren at last unless we keep in touch with 
religion in its more fundamental relations, at its 
creative source. 

The difference is very well illustrated by two sig- 
nificant little books recently published. One is 
When Evolution and Religion Meet, by Professor 
John M. Coulter and Professor Merle C. Coulter. 
The other is A Living Universe, by Principal L. P. 
Jacks of Manchester College, Oxford. The volume 
When Evolution and Religion Meet is a most useful 
introduction to various types of evolutionary theory. 
It is written with a fine sympathy with the ideals of 
Jesus. It is one of those pieces of honest and careful 
work for which we all ought to be grateful. But 
never once does it sound the fundamental note of 
religion. Science and the principles of Jesus meet 
in a noble fashion in this book. But evolution and 
religion do not meet because religion does not ap- 
pear. 


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The Nature of Religion 


On the other hand Principal Jacks brings you into 
the most definite contact with the very genius of 
religion. Of course he is very candid and open- 
minded in respect of all the great contributions of 
science. But to him biology itself speaks the lan- 
guage of religion. Science itself glows with the 
wonder of a religious experience. And in A Living 
Universe science and religion do meet. You close the 
book with quickened heart beat. Floods of inspira- 
tion are released and move all through your per- 
sonality. Science glows with the glory of religion and 
religion is seen as the consummation of science. 
What was prose in the work of the Professors Coulter 
is creative poetry with Principal Jacks. What was 
information in their useful volume is inspiration in 
his seminal lectures. 

Altogether it may seem wise for us this morning 
to spend a little while thinking of the nature of 
religion. There is nothing foreign to it. But some 
things are basal in it. And it will clarify our think- 
ing and enrich our living if we can get down to some 
of these basal matters. 


I 


Religion is a personal discovery. It is not some- 
thing we can hand on to others. It is something we 


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Lynn Harold Hough, Th.D., Litt.D. 


meet in the depths of our own experience. In a sense 
this is of course true of all the great matters. Even 
in conversation you cannot plant a thought in another 
man’s mind. You can only give him an opportunity 
with a flash of interested discovery to find that 
thought for himself. It is easy to over-emphasize 
social solidarity in the fundamental matters of life. 
And religion especially is never the creative experi- 
ence to which the word really belongs when it is 
second hand. When it is authentic it comes with 
the sudden glory of a personal discovery. And it 
takes strange forms. Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura 
may seem a fundamental attack on religion. But 
that stately order to which the Latin poet appeals 
from the wild anarchy of the gods of Olympus is 
itself a reality warm with all the beautiful wonder 
of religion to the followers of Epicurus. Thus Spake 
Zarathustra may seem the most deadly sort of at- 
tack on religion. But the apotheosis of the assertive 
will as over against the submissive will had all the 
glow of a religious experience to Nietzsche. To be 
sure there was not enough substance to the discovery 
of Lucretius to feed the spirit of humanity. And the 
discovery of Nietzsche left one-sided and alone was 
the sort of thing which breaks down human life. But 
each in his own way and in his own degree had con- 
tact with a truth which glowed brightly and kindled 
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The Nature of Religion 


all the devotion of religion. There is a difference 
between a religion and an adequate religion. But 
religion itself covers a wide area. 

To keep the note of discovery is the great battle 
of the historic religions. There are forces at work 
in all of them which tend to reduce the whole struc- 
ture to commonplaceness and dullness and conven- 
tion. The battle between the prophets and the 
priests is the perpetual conflict between the discov- 
erers and those who have no fresh contact with 
reality. 

This discovery must be made in the terms of the 
contemporary life and vernacular if it is to have the 
widest influences and power. In this sense it is rather 
unfortunate that we think of the canon of the Old 
and New Testaments as closed. For a closed form 
of experience is all too likely to mean for many men 
a literary prison beyond whose walls they dare not 
go. It was fortunate for the Jewish exiles that Eze- 
kiel could use thought-forms growing out of life in 
Babylonia. It was fortunate for early Christians that 
Paul could use thought-forms growing out of the 
Roman Empire’s vast and unified life. We need to 
claim the same sort of liberty to-day. 

For many a man the happiest approach to religion 
is through the whole biological process. Indeed we 
may go further and say that the whole cosmological 

305 


pe 


Lynn Harold Hough, Th.D., Litt.D. 


process is a great introduction to religion. Beginning 
with the first thrust of life from the water upon the 
land, on to the highest forms of life, beginning with 
the mutual aid seen all through the biological process, 
on to the greatness of motherhood which is self-sacri- 
fice alive; beginning with the first movement of mind 
among the creatures of this world on to the fulness 
of understanding of its greatest thinkers; beginning 
with the first outreach of man for God on to the 
perfect consciousness of fellowship with God which 
lived in Jesus; we may see the biological process itself 
as the expression of God at work in the world. As 
a notable contemporary teacher of science has said, 
we see “Jesus Christ to be the crown of the evolu- 
tionary process.”” And as the vision of the whole 
forward moving process with God moving through 
and in it for his own high aims possesses a man’s 
soul he begins to feel that the whole biological pro- 
cess is back of him and with him pushing him forward 
in every moral and spiritual battle. It is the moment 
of discovery when the facts science brings to light 
take on this moral and spiritual meaning that religion 
is born as a personal experience. Science itself be- 
comes the mother of a commanding and creative 
mysticism. This is not the only approach to a per- 
sonal experience of religion. But it is a very happy 
and nobly fruitful approach in our time. 


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The Nature of Religion 


II 


The second characteristic of religion which should 
command our attention is this. It is a perpetual per- 
sonal adventure. Donald Hankey put this insight 
into a striking phrase: “Religion is betting your life 
that there is a God.” There is always an element of 
noble risk. And when we stop to think of it, only 
by taking risks in the name of what ought to be, 
can character possibly grow. If you could reduce 
beauty to a mathematical formula the soul of the 
love of beauty as a personal experience would vanish. 
If you could reduce right and wrong to a demon- 
strated process of reasoning the wonder of the moral 
life would disappear. If you could reduce religion 
to absolute certainty religious experience would cease 
to be a creative and fruitful experience. It is just 
because all these things have an aspect of glorious 
adventure that they call for that courage and that 
dauntless enthusiasm which lie at the root of the 
greatest sort of character. The heroes of religion — 
belong to the same line as the great discoverers and 
the great pioneers. They go forth in the name of 
a dauntless ideal and an expectant faith. They are 
all the while believing in unknown lands beyond 
the tempestuous seas. And they are all the while 
sailing forth to make these lands their own. 


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Lynn Harold Hough, Th.D., Litt.D. 


When religion becomes organized and when its 
beliefs become codified there is always the tendency 
to forget this element of gay and heroic adventure. 
But personal Christian experience always keeps alive 
what the ecclesiastical system and the authoritative 
dogma would let die. For the personal experience 
of religion is always an act of dauntless faith. 
Herein is the preservation of the virility of religion, 
and herein is its perpetual appeal to the strong men 
who build empires and to the audacious spirits whom 
“only the farthest beacons beckon.” ‘There is a 
notable place for organization. And there is a pro- 
found significance in dogma. But the life of these 
must perpetually be renewed by the experience of 
religion as a personal adventure. 

All of this is strikingly clear in the experience of 
Jesus with his disciples. There is a perpetual air 
of freshness and vitality about the whole enterprise. 
When Jesus says, ‘Follow me,” he is calling men to 
the most heroic sort of adventure. There is the thrill 
of high romance. There is the poetry of the spirit 
which eagerly takes great risks. There is a sense 
of springtime and beautiful verdure. There is the 
bloom and fragrance of exquisite flowers. There is 
the promise of abundant harvest. There is life glow- 
ing and triumphant everywhere. 

When you follow the amazing journeys of the 

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, 
j 
; 
’ 
‘ 


The Nature of Religion 


Apostle Paul you are in the presence of the spirit 
of dauntless adventure. You feel the very pulse 
beats of an heroic faith. Paul would have under- 
stood the quality of Tennyson’s Ulysses. 


Tis not too late to seek a newer world; 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles; 

And see the great Achilles whom we knew. 

Tho’ much is taken, much abides, and tho’ 

We are not now that strength which in old days 
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are, 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate but strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 


The men and women who have pursued the paths 
of Christian experience with the most exhaustless 
eagerness give us constantly the high-sense of per- 
sonal adventure. The fourteenth century Bedford 
tinker put this insight into immortal English in Pzl- 
grim’s Progress. Whenever Christianity is truly alive 
it is a vital flame in the soul of the Christian. And 
that flame lights the way on an endless adventure of 
the spirit. 


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Lynn Harold Hough, Th.D., Litt.D. 


III 


Religion is an experience of certainty. It is the 
conscious meeting of time and eternity. It is the 
far-flying bird coming at last to its nest. It is hu- 
manity finding its home in the heart of God. But 
the very nature of this certainty is that it comes 
after the adventure and not before it. Indeed it 
comes at the very moment when all the risks are 
taken and the whole personality is put into the ad- 
venture whatever it costs. The hour of illuminated 
certainty is the hour of unhesitating daring. To use 
the great word of Jesus “when we will to do we 
know.” Certainty as a moral and spiritual experi- 
ence of the personal life is not a static or rigid thing. 
It is a rich and growing experience of satisfaction. 
It is the assurance of the bird on the wing. It is 
the certainty which comes in the experience of flight. 

Dr. Barbour’s biography of that great Scottish 
preacher, Alexander Whyte, who preached to the con- 
science of the English-speaking world as did no other 
man of his time, gives the reader the sense of a kind 
of high and aroused conviction of the reality of moral 
and spiritual things. And the discerning reader can- 
not fail to see that this abounding confidence was 
the ever-renewed assurance of a man who all his life 
was making new adventures of going forth in utter 

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The Nature of Religion 


dependence upon the living God. Christian certainty 
is the freest and most creative thing in all the world. 


IV 


The Christian religion is fellowship with a Christ- 
like God. The consummation of religion is the per- 
sonal appropriation of the insight that the living God 
is like Jesus Christ. That Jesus expressed in time 
what God is in Eternity is the central matter in the 
Christian faith. That as we look into the face of 
Christ we look into the face of God is the ultimate 
matter of Christian experience. 

The moral experience of Jesus in relation to good- 
ness and evil, love and hate, brotherhood and selfish- 
ness, is the expression of the very character of God 
within the area of human life. And the cross with 
its exhaustless passion for goodness and its exhaust- 
less love for men and women caught in the meshes 
of evil, that rescuing splendor of sacrificial love, is 
the glowing center of the Christian religion. To see 
God through the eye which Jesus gives us is to make 
the great moral and spiritual discovery. To enter 
into fellowship with him is the supreme adventure 
of daring faith. To live in the light of that adven- 
ture is to find certainty as faith becomes action. To 
seek above all things in the individual life and in 

311 


Lynn Harold Hough, Th.D., Litt.D. 


all social and corporate relations the will of the God 
whose face we see in the face of Christ is to become 
a vital part of the Kingdom of God in the world. 
Religion begins in discovery and adventure. It ends 
in Christlike character. It begins as an experience 
of the individual. It comes to its consummation in 
a transformed society. Dante’s rose of love and fire 
is the symbol of the final bloom of religion in time 
and in eternity. 


312 


THE TRUE PROTESTANTISM 


Dr. Merrill is a New Jersey man, born at Orange in 1867, 
educated at Rutgers College and Union Theological Seminary, 
and was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1890. After 
important pastorates in Trinity Church, Philadelphia, and the 
Sixth Church of Chicago, he came to the Brick Church in New 
York, where he has had a distinguished ministry both as 
preacher and Christian leader. With the passion of a prophet 
he unites a practical acumen and poise of judgment—some- 
thing more than astuteness—which makes him sagacious and 
inspiring in counsel. As president of the Board of the Church 
Peace Union, he is a leader equally in the movements toward 
Christian unity and international comity, whereof we read in 
The Common Creed Christians and Christian Internationalism. 
This sermon is characteristic of his qualities, alike in its tem- 
per and its teaching, and is a notable plea in behalf of a posi- 
tive, constructive Protestantism, bringing the old values of 
faith to the service of the new vision of the world and its need: 
a comprehensive, forward-looking Church, uniting different 
points of view in one sovereign loyalty, never better expounded 
than in his Yale lectures on the liberty of the pulpit. 


THE TRUE PROTESTANTISM 


WILLIAM P. MERRILL, D.D. 
THE BRICK CHURCH, NEW YORK 


“The just shall live by faith.’ Romans 1: 17. 


Three hundred years ago, at about this time in the 
year, a little company of some thirty families, Wal- 
loons by race, Protestants in religion, sailed into the 
mouth of the Hudson River and settled, a few here 
on Manhattan, more where Albany now stands. 
They came, as the Pilgrims had come to Plymouth 
four years before, that they might escape from per- 
secution and be free to worship God according to 
their own best light. Like the Pilgrims, they had 
been for years guests in the hospitable land of Hol- 
land, and had gained much in their sojourn there. 
Much honor has been paid to the Dutch settlers of 
New Amsterdam, and more to the Puritan settlers 
of New England. We do well to remember these 
French men and women who contributed not a little 
to those religious and moral forces which have made 
our country great and strong. Their blood is in our 
veins, and their spirit is in our souls. It is quite 
impossible to estimate the debt owed by the free 

315 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 


modern world to those Huguenot exiles, who were 
driven from France in large numbers by the cruelty 
and folly of bigoted rulers. Their descendants came 
with the English settlers to New England and with . 
the Dutch to New Netherlands. We are glad to 
honor their memory in this service. 

It would be of doubtful value to use the sermon 
time in a historical statement about this little com- 
pany. When we have said that they were French 
Protestants, exiled for fidelity to their religion to 
Holland, and coming to these shores for further free- 
dom and opportunity, we have said all that need be 
said. It will honor these sturdy pioneers far more, 
and meet far better the needs of our own time, if 
we think about that Protestant spirit which was so 
dear to them, and how it may be effective in our own 
day—that Protestantism for which they were cheer- 
fully ready to “suffer the loss of all things.” The 
best use we can make of an honored past is to carry 
it forward into an honorable future. 

Let us then, in grateful appreciation of these men 
of three centuries ago, and of their heroic stand for 
the truth of God as they saw and felt it, think of 
the present demand and need for a truly Protestant 
faith and spirit. 

The times demand a revival of true Protestantism. 
That is one of the great and vital needs of the present 


316 


The True Protestantism 


world-situation. That does not mean that we need 
an anti-Catholic spirit or movement. It is unfortu- 
nate that to some the word “Protestant”? means above 
all a spirit and movement antagonistic to the Roman 
Catholic Church, and to the Catholic idea or tendency 
in certain sections of Protestantism. No doubt we 
do need ever to be quietly on guard against the en- 
croachments of priestliness. There is something in 
autocracy which makes freemen watchful if they are 
wise. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” 
Dean Hodges well said, ‘‘Religion in every age needs 
both the prophet and the priest. But the prophet 
can be trusted; the priest needs to be watched.” 
But a Protestantism, which is in the main an anti- 
Romanism, is a pitiful thing. To be “anti” anything 
is a poor sort of business. There are altogether too 
many people in the world to-day satisfied to hold a 
critical position, to be opposed to something, or to 
everything. The revival of Protestantism which is 
needed is not an increase of such a critical and nega- 
tive attitude. To stand up for Protestantism is not 
at all synonymous with standing against Romanism. 
Indeed we have grossly misused and misread the 
very word “Protestant.”’ Many people have con- 
fessed a dislike for the name on the ground that they 
do not want to be labeled as eternally entering pro- 
test, forever objecting to something or somebody. 


317 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 


But a very little thought and study shows that that 
is a complete misunderstanding of a great and hon- 
orable word. Those of us who retain even a frag- 
ment of our knowledge of Latin know that that first 
syllable, “pro” means not “against,” but “for”; and 
that the root “test” means “bearing witness.”’ Look 
in a good lexicon, and you find that the idea of ob- 
jecting to something, the notion of a critical or an- 
tagonistic attitude is a secondary or remote meaning 
of the word “protest.” The primary meaning is to 
“make a solemn affirmation,” “‘to bear witness to a 
truth or belief one holds.” It is unfortunate that the 
word “protest” has come to be associated with critical 
or pugnacious acts, has acquired an implication of be- 
ing in the opposition, and is even associated with bad 
checks. We need to get back to the original and real 
meaning. The Protestant is one who is ready to 
bear testimony on behalf of something real and vital. 
He is a witness, a martyr in the original sense of that 
great word. 

We need also to make clear the fact that, when 
we call for a re-assertion of the Protestant faith and 
spirit, we are not urging a more strict adherence to 
the traditions and definitions of the Protestantism 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

The leaders of the Reformation formulated their 
theological convictions in great creeds and treatises. 

318 


The True Protestantism 


These are noble documents; in the main they ex- 
press the true Protestant convictions for our day as 
for the day in which and for which they were pre- 
pared. But that which we so greatly need is not a 
rigid adherence to these doctrinal statements. It is 
always wrong to exalt form above spirit: it is more 
than wrong, it is treason, for Protestants to do that. 
John Robinson, leader of the English Puritan exiles 
in Holland, called by one of his most bitter enemies 
“the most learned, polished, and modest spirit that 
ever separated from the Church of England,” told 
the little band of Pilgrims in his farewell address at 
Delftshaven that one serious trouble in the Protes- 
tant churches was the tendency of both Calvinists 
and Lutherans to “stick where Calvin and Luther 
left them.” Both Calvin and Luther, he declared, 
were great and shining lights in their day; but God 
had new truth for the new day, which should be 
seized and followed as eagerly as Calvin and Luther 
followed the truth they saw. The essence of Prot- 
estantism is in a spirit, not in creeds or forms It is 
that Protestant spirit which needs revival, re-asser- 
tion, to-day as the essential attitude of free Christian 
souls. 

What are the chief elements of this true Protestant 
Spirit and attitude? 

Its fundamental position is the right of the in- 


319 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 


dividual soul to find God for himself. No man or 
church can say to the free human spirit, “You must 
find God in this way, or you cannot find Him at all.” 
God is not bound up in any sacraments, or in any 
writings, nor is He closeted in any church buildings 
or holy places. His ministers, whether they be called 
priests or presbyters (and John Milton’s keen thrust 
still has point to it, that ‘presbyter is only priest writ 
large’) are here to be useful to men, but not to rule 
over their souls; to be servants, not lords. The lead- 
ers of the Reformation insisted strongly on “the unt- 
versal priesthood of believers.”” Every man is meant 
to find God, to know God, to live with God, for 
himself, without the dictation of any ecclesiastical 
authority. The moment any priest, or any ecclesi- 
astical body whatever, attempts to say just what the 
individual believer shall believe, or how he shall pray, 
or what he shall do, it is time for the true Protestant 
to stand up and protest, not only bearing witness 
against spiritual tyranny, but bearing his testimony 
for spiritual freedom and the right of the individual 
soul to find God for itself, and to live in the light 
that comes from Him. 

But Protestantism is not unregulated individual- 
ism. The true Protestant is not a spiritual anarchist. 
The Reformers clearly discerned a second funda- 
mental principle, to be combined and balanced with 

320 


The True Protestantism 


the right of the individual soul and conscience—the 
principle of the supreme authority of the Bible in 
matters of faith and conduct. They recognized the 
fact that we are not only individuals, but social be- 
ings, realizing our best selves only in relation with 
other men and with God. Therefore they rightly 
saw that there must be an agreement on some com- 
mon standard. With great daring they cast aside 
the authority of pope and council, of creed and cus- 
tom and tradition, and affirmed that the word of 
God, which we call the Bible, is the “only infallible 
rule of faith and conduct.” 

The wisest among them were careful to guard well 
this declaration of the supreme authority of the 
Scriptures, that it might not become simply another 
rigid external authority over the free souls of men. 
Carefully they stated that its authority extends not 
to all matters, not to history, or science, or philoso- 
phy, but “what we are to believe concerning God, 
and what duty God requires of man.” Strenuously 
they insisted that the word of God is not to become 
a new law, binding the soul. Emphatically they de- 
clared that it is not to be held subject to any one 
credal interpretation, that it is superior to all creeds 
and forms and counsels of men. It is inspiring to 
read the Westminster Confession of Faith, and find 
that strong massive statement of doctrine so elastic 

O24 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 
and vital in its idea of the Bible, always insisting 
that our faith in its authority comes, not from any 
man or church, or from any external proofs, but from 
the spirit of God witnessing in our hearts as we read; 
that the plain man is to go freely to the Bible for 
his guidance; that the scholar is to go freely to the 
original sources of the Bible and study them with 
open mind; that the supreme Judge is always the 
Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures. In every 
possible way true Protestants have always guarded, 
as equally precious, essential each to the other, 
neither one ever to be surrendered to the other, the 
divine authority of the Bible, and the right of private 
judgment on truth and duty. The glory of the true 
Protestant spirit and attitude is this well-balanced 
faith in the Bible and in the conscience and soul of 
the believer. It believes heartily in both. It is not 
afraid to leave them alone together. It puts the 
Bible—unaccompanied by any authoritative inter- 
pretation, this rich, varied, glorious, wild-flower- 
garden of a book, into the hands of every believer, 
and says to him, “Here is your guide; you can trust 
its guidance better than you can trust any other. 
Use your intellect honestly upon it; face what it 
says; fit it to your actual life; practise what you 
find in it; and you shall be guided without fail as — 
to your faith and conduct.” 


322 


The True Protestantism 


These are the two great foundations of the Prot- 
estant position, the supreme right of the individual 
to find God for himself, and the supreme authority 
of the Bible as God’s word to the soul. 

There are other noble and necessary elements in 
the true Protestant faith, at which we can only hint. 
Protestantism has always been interested in spiritual 
experience, and therefore in living and vital religion. 
It is essentially a religion of the present and future. 
It venerates the sacred past and believes in it; but 
chiefly as a means of serving present needs and future 
opportunities. Protestantism is the living religion 
of the Living God. There is no tradition of the past 
which it holds more sacred than the present spiritual 
experience of living believers. It says to every man 
what God said to Moses out of the bush, “‘The place 
whereon thou standest is holy ground.” 

It follows from this, as it should follow, that Prot- 
estantism is profoundly interested in present social 
outworkings of Christian faith and life. It is signifi- 
cant that wherever Protestantism has gone, especially 
in its Reformed or Calvinistic form, it has instinc- 
tively allied itself with popular movements, with 
struggles for democracy and human freedom and en- 
lightenment. It was the faith of William the Silent 
in Holland, of Cromwell in England, of the men who, 
at King’s Mountain, broke the back of British tyr- 

O23 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 


anny on this continent. Calvinists have been fa- 
mous, at times notorious, for their social and political 
activities. They have viewed their religion as a 
power to be set to work and made effective in all 
human affairs. 

Protestantism, at its best, when true to its real 
spirit and genius, has ever been unafraid in the pres- 
ence of facts, new or old: it has been the religion of 
the open mind, of the honest conscience, of the dar- 
ing spirit, of the pioneer in truth and action. It has 
been and is, in truth, a broad, liberal, comprehensive 
faith, grounded in the firm acceptance of Christ and 
His Gospel, and committed to the open and free way 
of every soul to the finding of God, truth, and duty. 

That is the sort of faith that drove these exiles 
across the sea three hundred years ago. That is the 
sort of faith needed to-day. There are certain facts 
which show with crystal clearness the indispensable 
value and necessity of such a Christian faith just 
now. 

It is becoming more and more clear that the world 
needs and must have a universal religion, to serve 
as a unifying force among men. Romanism cannot 
meet this need. Only a religion at once strong and 
elastic can win and serve all the world of mankind. 
No religion calling for blind submission to external 
authority can possibly appeal to the world of this 

324 


The True Protestantism 


day. Nor can any one variety of religious experience 
and practice. The day has gone by for expecting 
that all men will some time be Presbyterians or Bap- 
tists; or even that they will all some day accept the 
creeds and traditions of sixteenth century Reformers. 
Only a moving religion, a religion that can go ahead 
without losing touch with the past, can have the 
slightest hope of being a religion for all the world. 
And that means a religion of the spirit, such as Prot- 
estantism is at heart: a religion content to hold up 
Christ, and to let Him say to all men, “I am the way, 
and the truth, and the life,’ and to trust all men, 
and urge all men, to find for themselves that way, 
that truth, that life; a religion generous, comprehen- 
sive, large-minded; finding a sufficient unity in devo- 
tion to the personality of Christ and to His cause, 
with large liberty of definition and interpretation. 
The world is lost religiously unless it can be shown 
a religion able to grapple successfully with modern 
science and with modern industry, and to fill them 
with the right spirit. Christianity is the only re- 
ligion that has made the slightest attempt to fit itself 
to modern science and to modern industrial condi- 
tions; and it is Christianity in its Protestant form 
that has done this with real seriousness. It has not 
done it wholeheartedly as yet, nor without serious 
and violent opposition, both from within and from 
325 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 


without its own ranks. But nowhere in the world 
is there any religious body that is even making an 
effort to meet the modern world honestly and master 
it for God, except in the Protestant Churches. If 
that is not a call to Protestantism for a new depth 
and height of loyalty, what could be? The world 
is waiting for just such a religion as we might provide, 
were we in earnest. Dare we do less than our ut- 
most 

Protestantism alone, the religion of the free soul, 
of the open mind, of joy in truth, and trust in the 
Bible as the revelation of God in terms of spiritual 
experience, Protestantism alone can meet the re- 
ligious needs of the great and growing body of stu- 
dents in our country. It is a mighty and significant 
phenomenon, comparable to some of those great in- 
stinctive mass movements to which we look back in 
history with interest, this rush of eager youth that 
overflows and embarrasses all our educational insti- 
tutions. More than ever before in any land, the 
student body, the educated folk, must be reckoned 
with here in America. The only religion that can 
appeal to them and hold them is a truly, vitally Prot- 
estant Christianity. Either they will wander with 
only a vague and passionless belief, or they will live 
in compartments, their religion shut off from their 
intellectual and practical interests, unless we can 


326 


The True Protestantism 


give them a true religion of the spirit, centered in 
Christ, Christ freely offered, Christ freely interpreted, 
Christ the Lord of their life and of the world’s life, 
a religion that leaves ample play for the free intel- 
lect, for the free conscience, for forward movement. 
Only true Protestantism has such a faith to offer. 

There is a vast mass of folk outside the churches, 
or but loosely affiliated with them, who must be won 
and held, if the church of Christ is to play its right 
and full part in the life of this country and this 
period. Here also there is no hope in religions of 
authority. These thoughtful masses—more thought- 
ful than often we imagine—cannot be driven or 
scared or coaxed into the church. They can be won 
only by a faith and spirit not afraid to come out 
into the open, to meet honest questions with honest 
dealing and without dogmatism, to set its Christ, its 
Bible, and everything it has and is, where all men 
can see and handle and judge for themselves. A 
religion with anything to hide is already discredited. 
A faith that must continually beat about the bush 
will not get far. 

To one who views the conditions of to-day with 
open eyes and honest mind, there comes a tremendous 
call for a revival of true Protestantism; not the 
Fundamentalism that walks backward with its eyes 
on the past: not the Modernism that rushes forward, 

327 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 


careless whether it keeps the path; but true Protes- 
tantism, the religion of the free soul and the open 
Bible, the religion of the spirit, the religion that is 
bold and broad and ever moving on, and that trusts 
ultimately and unreservedly in that Spirit of the 
Living God who ‘speaks in the Bible, and lives and 
works unceasingly in the soul of man. 

Not Protestantism as a negative, critical, vague, 
cool attitude of soul: not what Protestantism too 
often is, an indifferentism, an intellectualism, on the 
one hand content with the mechanical holding of 
certain doctrines, on the other proud of the freedom 
which means lack of conviction: that sort of Prot- 
estantism is not what we need. We have too much 
of it. That which we need, that for which we ought 
to be on our knees crying out to God ir prayer, that 
which ought to be like a fire in our hearts and minds 
and bones, is the faith of the ancient prophets, the 
spiritual grace of the Lord Jesus and His apostles, 
the strong passionate conviction that God is here with 
us now, and that all our hope is in Him, that we 
know Him in Jesus Christ and in this rich, wonderful 
Word of His; and that the only way by which the 
world can be saved is by having Christ and the Word 
of God freely set in the midst, for every man and 
every group of men to lay hold of as they will, in 
the light of their honest convictions, 


328 


The True Protestantism 


Not a protesting religion, in the ordinary, narrow 
sense of that word; a religion on the defensive, in 
the opposition; but a Protestant religion, bearing 
witness for the great, eternal truths by which men 
live, not afraid to give its testimony in the open, and 
to stand by it—that is the religion that is needed 
to-day. It is our splendid privilege to set it before 
men in winsome and compelling form. 

‘The just shall live by his faith.”” This is the age- 
long motto of the religion of free souls. But we 
need to take it in a new sense, which yet shall be 
its original sense. For it means most of all that faith 
is that by which true men live; and that the test of 
the reality of one’s religion, the ultimate, decisive 
test, is not what he thinks, or what opinions he holds, 
but whether he lives by the faith he professes. Too 
many of us are negative Protestants, defending our 
freedom from priestcraft, and superstition, and eccle- 
siastical tyranny, and forms and ceremonies, priding 
ourselves on our liberty, but content with a lazy lib- 
erty. Oh, for a passionate Protestantism, not fanati- 
cal, free as God’s air or sunlight, but as wholly de- 
voted to God and to His free truth as was the Master 
himself, fervent in devotion to our free heritage. I 
call you and myself to a new loyalty, a new commit- 
ment to the true religion of the spirit, that we shall 
be indeed ‘‘Protestants”—witnesses to the faith in 

329 


William P. Merrill, D.D. 


which we believe, loyal, devoted, unwavering in our 
service of the free religion of the spirit and of the 
Word; fulfilling the noble ideal set in glowing words 
by a great Protestant leader: 

“To live by trust in God; to do and say the sah 
because it is lovely; to dare to gaze on the splendor 
of naked truth, without putting a false veil before 
it to terrify children and old women by mystery and 
vagueness; to live by love and not by fear: that is the 
life of a true brave man, who will take Christ and 
His mind for the truth, instead of the clamor of either 
the worldly world or the religious world.” 

God help us to heed the call that comes to us to- 
day from a world in need of a saving of faith, and 
from a Christ waiting to save! 


330 


THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF HOPE 


Last April the Old South Church of Boston observed the 
fortieth anniversary of the installation of Dr. Gordon as its 
pastor: a happy and historic occasion celebrating a memora- 
ble ministry. It was a day of joy not only for a great Church, 
but for a vast host of young men who owe the gracious 
preacher an unpayable debt, both for personal friendship and 
spiritual guidance. A Scotsman born in 1853, Dr. Gordon took 
his theological training at Bangor Seminary, afterwards grad- 
uating from Harvard University; and having served his ap- 
prenticeship in two village pastorates, he came to Old South 
Church in 1884. Besides making his pulpit a throne of power, 
as overseer of Harvard University, as lecturer on the Ingersoll, 
Lowell, Beecher, and Taylor Foundations, as well as in his 
books, he has been a preacher-theologian, a philosopher with 
the vision of a poet, a vital and constructive thinker in an era 
of theological confusion: as I have described him elsewhere, ‘‘a 
preacher whose sermons are lyrics and whose theology is an 
epic.” If one were asked to name the two volumes of Best 
Sermons in our time, some of us would select Through Man to 
God and Revelation and the Ideal: the first a theodicy of amaz- 
ing beauty and splendor; the second a series of visions in 
which the grand ideality of religious faith, shining through the 
cathedral windows of Bible literature, casts its revealing light 
upon the issues of character and the awful tides of human 
circumstance. There is about the man, as he fares toward 
sunset, a grace of character, a wisdom of faith, an old-gold 
mellowness of soul, and what Carlyle felt in Chalmers, “a 
serenity as of the on-coming evening and the star-crowned 
night.” Who can better set forth the ultimate ground of that 
Eternal Hope by which the pilgrim generations of humanity 
have been lighted, lifted, and led? 


THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF HOPE 


GEORGE A. GORDON, D.D. 
OLD SOUTH CHURCH, BOSTON 


“Now the God of hope ful you with all joy and peace in 
believing, that ye may abound in hope, and in the power of the 
Holy Spirit.’ Romans 15: 13. 


Our life has three dimensions: the past, the pres- 
ent, and the future. And our God answers to our 
life as thus defined, the God who was and who is 
and who is to come. ‘The believing soul receives 
help from the Infinite One through memory, through 
experience, and through hope. Christian history, 
Christian experience, and Christian hope, these are 
the channels along which the consoling and creative 
might of God comes. The Christian soul is a king 
with an army: memory is the rear guard, the center 
is experience, and the vanguard hope. 

There are many sources of hope. ‘There is tem- 
perament; some human beings are so constituted that 
the darker the day, the muddier the road, and the 
more distressing the circumstances of the pilgrimage, 
the heartier, the wittier, the brighter, the more hope- 
ful they become. What an amazing gift such a 

333 


George A. Gordon, D.D. 


temperament is, what a boon such a soul, singing 
like the bird in the black shadow of the gathering 
thunder-storm. Other men are hopeful because 
they are in the prime of life. Again, if they are 
worthy of their superb physical existence, they are 
a vast blessing to their fellowmen. You have seen 
them, men so strong, so healthy, so vital, that they 
cannot imagine why anybody should not hope. 
There are others hopeful because of easy circum- 
stances in life; others because they have a great 
capacity for friendship, which has been fortunately 
met. We are all more or less hopeful because we 
are citizens in a young, mighty, and growing nation. 
Others are hopeful because they are succeeding in 
their various occupations and professions; success 
creates hope. And others still, nobler perhaps than 
any I have already mentioned, are full of hope be- 
cause they share in the best enterprises of their time. 

I mention these sources of hope not to discuss 
them, but on the way to the great, ultimate ground 
of all hope, that is, God and the character of God. 
There is but one reason for hopelessness in our life, 
only one. If there is no God at the head of the 
Universe, if there is no Ruler of men and of nations, 
if there is no Heavenly Father, if the Universe has 
no heart of fire and soul of pity for man, if there is 
no Intelligence and Goodwill in command of the 


334 


The Ultimate Ground of Hope 


whole business of being, then hope is an illusion; a 
ship at sea without a navigator is a hopeless ship. 

I remember passing once an abandoned ship in 
mid-ocean. Our great steamer swung out of its 
course and round the poor, doomed craft, to see if 
anybody alive was on it. It was sunk almost to the 
water’s edge, tossed to and fro, the waves breaking 
over it, the canvas torn into ribbons; it was doomed; 
it was a melancholy and an unforgetable spectacle. 
But such would be our Universe by itself, unnavi- 
gated, unguided, uncontrolled, and unfilled with ab- 
solute Intelligence. There is but one fundamental, 
everlasting reason for hope; that is, God. If He 
is, then nature is but the expression of his Mind; 
in all its gloom and all its grandeur, it is still the 
shadow of God; all life is from his Life, all rational 
life from Reason in him, all moral life the breath of 
his Conscience; our human love and all the treasures 
of love are from Love in him. If we can repeat the 
Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, 
hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy 
Will be done in earth as it is in Heaven,” and if that 
is our faith, then there is no room for anything but 
hope. 

There are four classes of human beings for whom 
we may hope. First, those who suffer through igno- 
rance, suffer terribly, suffer fatally. Think of the 

835 


George A. Gordon, D.D. 


widespread suffering through ignorance; ignorance 
of physical law, ignorance of mental law, ignorance 
of moral law, and consequent torture of body, dis- 
tress of mind, and woe of conscience. What a terri- 
ble world that is in which to live. And yet if there 
is a God in the world, we may hope for those who 
live there. We can see some ground for hope in their 
lives, and beyond there is God to take care of them 
where we are blind. In the first place, their suffer- 
ing calls attention to the awful fact of ignorance. 
Ignorance is a wild beast, the worst wild beast in 
the world but one, perversity. A great cry of suffer- 
ing comes from all parts of the world, and, in re- 
sponse, medical science, educational science, and re- 
ligion come to the relief of the ignorant. And where 
we cannot see, God stands beyond. Surely, suffering 
does one thing, the suffering which comes through 
ignorance; it makes a man want to get out of it— 
and that is something—and out of that which leads 
to it. 

There is the second class, those who suffer from 
the ignorance and from the brutality of others. 
Take the children of the world as an example; the 
children of a drunken father, the children of an igno- 
rant and brutal mother, think of the woe in their 
life, and from those who have influence over them, 
from their ignorance and their wickedness. 


336 


The Ultimate Ground of Hope 


The greatest example in all history of this kind 
of suffering is the Lord Jesus. He went to his cross 
on account of the ignorance and the wickedness of 
men; with what issue? The way of the cross is the 
way of light. In the tragedy of the life of Christ 
you are able to spell out a few meanings in the trag- 
edy of the life of the world. He died on account 
of the ignorance and the brutality of his nation, and 
out of it has come the saving grace of the world. 
They who suffer from the ignorance and wickedness 
of others often and often become noble men and 
women, crying out to God for what they can get no- 
where else, and through their suffering, let in light 
upon the general tragedy of the world. 

The third class is the class of the wicked. Our 
fathers used to dispose of them very shortly—to 
Hell with them all when they die; after threescore 
years and ten, or any portion of that; if they were 
found on the wrong side, send them to their doom. 
That is no longer a belief among intelligent people 
in any part of Christendom. Why? Because the 
highest thing in the world, the Spirit of Christ, for- 
bids it; because the highest thing in the Universe, 
the character of God, forbids it. We have hope for 
them. On what ground? Because, if you find your- 
self traveling against a storm, and that storm in- 
creases to a hurricane, and the road grows more and 


337 


George A. Gordon, D.D. 


more steep and dangerous, by and by you will find 
that you cannot pursue that journey; you are on the 
wrong trail. The stars in their courses fight against 
the wicked man in his wickedness. The storm and 
hurricane of God’s government of the world blow in 
the face of those -who are walking the wrong way. 
They may persevere, they may push on for a long 
time, but no man can win against God. That does 
not mean that scoundrels, blackguards, thieves, cut- 
throats, and murderers are to be carried to Heaven 
on flowery beds of ease. It means simply that God 
is reasoning with wicked men in the courses of their 
nature and through their whole being, and that vital 
argument will continue until they give in and quit 
the business; and then they must travel back with 
bare feet on the terrible road over which they have 
come. The Universe is tender, but eternally just, 
and no man can by a few tears wipe out a wicked 
past, or by a few words of repentance adjust himself 
to the stern conscience of the world. And all this is 
grand, tragically grand. There is no fooling with 
the Universe; we must pay our debts; but then God 
will help us to pay our debts, however big they may 
be, and therein is hope for the worst being in the 
Universe. : 

In old Calvinistic Scotland, Burns wrote a poem 
to the Devil, and he had the audacity, nearly one 

338 | 


The Ultimate Ground of Hope 


hundred and forty years ago, to hope that Satan 
might be converted. 


Ye aiblins might—I dinna ken— 
Still hae a stake. 


There is a chance for you yet. It is part of the 
longing of every noble soul for the redemption from 
wickedness, of every rational being, and it is part of 
the faith of the noblest soul that not even the Evil 
Spirit can win against the Almighty and good God. 

The fourth class for whom we may hope is com- 
posed of our dead. We ask, how can they survive? 
Millions and billions of them have left the world; 
where are they? ‘Their mental life was dependent 
upon their physical being, especially upon the nerv- 
ous organism; when that was paralyzed in death, 
what became of their minds? And we pile up ob- 
jections and doubts against faith in the continuance 
of the human spirit, all of these objections and doubts 
gathered from the limitations of our knowledge and 
the boundlessness of our ignorance. What is a cob- 
web in the path of a planet? And what are your 
difficulties and doubts to the Lord God Omnipotent 
if He wants to save your soul and keep it alive for- 
ever? 

What is Christianity? It is the revelation of God 
as the Father of the world; the supreme significance 


339 


George A. Gordon, D.D. 


of Jesus Christ is this, his revelation of the moral 
being and fatherly love of God. ‘He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father,” and all the ages of Chris- 
tian faith from the first have sustained themselves 
by the belief that the Infinite Mystery that we call 
God is as good, as tender, as merciful, and as mindful 
of man as Jesus Christ was in the days of his flesh. 
Remember that Christianity is our greatest religion, 
because it gives us the greatest rendering of the char- 
acter of God. 

Think, as we close, of the names for God in the 
New Testament: the Father of Lights, the Light in 
whom is no darkness at all, the Father of Mercies, 
the God of All Comfort, the God of Pity, the God of 
Peace, the God of Patience. This poor, confused, 
wild world is absolutely unable to exhaust His en- 
during compassion. He is the God of Love, and this 
morning the God of Hope. 

If your child is sick, and your physician says there 
is good hope, that ends your fatal anxiety. If your 
boy has lived a bad life, and you are told that he 
has taken hold of the hope set before him and be- 
come a new man, peace comes to your poor heart. 
No man ever yet became a suicide who had hope. 

Hope is one of the greatest things in the world. 
It is like the sun going ahead of our planet, blazing 
a path of light and glory for it. We cannot remain 


340 


The Ultimate Ground of Hope 


in the business of well-doing without hope, and we 
cannot remain seekers for the truth, for clearness, and 
for better views in faith, without hope. We cannot 
stand at the grave of our friends without hope. We 
cannot look out upon the tumult of the world in 
which we live, and the tragedy, without hope. Hope 
is absolutely indispensable to science, to philosophy, 
to government, to morals, to physical living, to the 
whole Universe. And for your faith there is the 
God of Hope. 

Let us take this message home. We are made of 
flesh and blood; we have great capacities for suffer- 
ing as well as for joy. We are traveling on our way; 
we have got to go on. How shall we go? With a 
great hope blazing a path for us through the night. 
Follow in the track of that hope. May the God of 
Hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing; 
may you abound in hope and live a life like the 
songbirds in the spring on the wing, with a lyric 
pouring from their heart every morning and every 
evening. 


341 


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A SCRAP OF SUNSET 


Dr. Huget is a native of Iowa, and began his career as a 
teacher, first in the public schools of the State, and later as 
Professor of Education in Coe College, and as University ex- 
aminer and instructor in Education in the State University 
of Iowa. He left the university for the pulpit in 1903, has had 
fruitful pastorates at Cedar Rapids, Galesburg, Detroit, and 
since 1917 at the Tompkins Avenue Church, Brooklyn—one of 
the largest Congregational Churches in America. One of the 
best beloved men in the American pulpit, he unites the delicate 
insight of a poet with the practical capacity of a great pastor. 
With the exception of a little booklet entitled What Would 
Lincoln Say to this Generation? Dr. Huget has published little, 
and a volume of his sermons is long overdue. The sermon here 
included, weaving a text from an ancient Psalm with a line 
from Edgar Fawcett’s poem, “To the Baltimore Oriole”— 


“In some glad moment was it Nature’s choice 
To dower a scrap of sunset with a voice?”— 


is typical of one aspect of a noble and gracious ministry; and 
it adds to the present volume the benediction of heauty. 


A SCRAP OF SUNSET 


JAMES PERCIVAL HUGET, D.D. 
TOMPKINS AVENUE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BROOKLYN 


“In thy light we shall see light”’ Psalm 36: 9. 
“To give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in 
be jace oj Jesus.Christ;’ (2; Cor: 4:6. 


For many years I have felt the peculiar beauty and 
power in the words of the Psalm, ‘In Thy light we 
shall see light.”’ Yet, I have never used this text as 
a basis for a sermon. The sermon is there, and it is 
at once evident. It is one of the texts that have a 
message in the very wording and in the beauty of 
the thought. But, at the same time, I have never 
felt that I had fully caught the deeper inner mean- 
ing. Nor do I feel now that I have entered into all 
the treasury and significance and suggestion in these 
moving words. Yet a certain thought has been shap- 
ing itself for a long time in mind and heart, and 
because of certain reasons that thought has seemed 
now to reach the time for its wording. 

One phase of this is quite familiar and often ex- 
pressed. It is this: There is an understanding of 
the great spiritual message which comes to some men 


345 


Jamés Percival Huget, D.D. 


in special degree, by reason of the illumination of 
the spirit. This we call inspiration. And by this I 
mean that there is knowledge which men do not gain 
of themselves, knowledge which would be beyond 
their attainment, were it not that it is imparted, 
knowledge which comes to them, and through them 
to us, by way of God’s revelation. We have also 
been accustomed to more or less closely associate and 
limit this conception of inspiration to its appearance 
in connection with the writing of the Holy Scriptures. 
We believe that these sacred writings contain the self- 
revelation of God. We believe that God has spoken 
thus for the instruction and guidance of men. We 
believe that holy men of old spoke as they were 
moved by the Holy Spirit. 

Yet in all of this we have been too much accus- 
tomed to discuss the whole doctrine of inspiration 
as if it were quite apart from any such ordinary 
experience as our own. We have felt that that time 
was another time than ours; we have felt that the 
prophets belonged to another age and another ex- 
perience; we have thought that God broke the eter- 
nal silence, but permitted that silence again to close 
in upon the life of the world. We have assumed 
that God spake to the fathers of old, but speaks 
thus tomen no more. If this Doctrine of Experience 
is to be valid for us we must believe that the men 


346 





A Scrap of Sunset 


of old who spoke as they were moved by the Holy 
Spirit are in every sense our spiritual kinsmen. Does 
it seem to be going beyond the truth of things to 
recognize in our own highest moments, in the rare 
but real hours when we see clearly, the presence of 
some great truth and the same great revealing opera- 
tion of the Divine Presence? The realm of the spirit 
lies about us. It is as true for us and as near to us 
as to our fathers. This is what Edwin Arnold means 
in one of his profound and more elusive poems in 
which he speaks of the “larger world upon our own 
impinging,’ whereof we have swift glimpses and mo- 
mentary glowing awareness. He compares this ex- 
perience to our knowledge of “spacious circles lumi- 
nous with mind,” to the light which comes from the 
hidden sun when some dark cloud is “touched to a 
sudden glory round the edge.” By this he would 
mean that just as the ring of silver or gold, or rose 
or crimson that borders the sunset cloud, is not ; 
only in itself a thing of light, but that it is the reve- 
lation of the greater life of the unseen sun, so these 
radiant and enlightened moments of the spirit are 
the indications and proof of the eternal light-giving 
spirit which thereby is made evident and knowable. 
There should be something of the prophet in every 
man. Every preacher, however humble, should have 
some message of prophetic fire. Every Christian in 
347 


James Percival Huget, D.D. 


the pew should some time hear and some time re- 
utter the voice of the Spirit. Yes, there should be 
something of the prophet in every man. He should 
have awareness, however partial; he should have be- 
holding, however dim; he should have knowledge, 
however incomplete, of reality beyond his immediate 
experience. God speaks to every man who will hear. 
Certainly we have no warrant for supposing that the 
Holy Spirit becomes silent. We remember Lowell’s 
great assertion that “God is not dumb, that He should 
speak no more.” 

I have called this sermon “A Scrap of Sunset.” 
The phrase is borrowed from a poem by Edgar Faw- 
cett in which, writing of the oriole, he speaks of the 
glad moment when it was Nature’s choice to “dower 
a scrap of sunset with a voice.” Yet, what should 
this scrap of sunset or any other fragment of glory 
be but the immediate reflection of a vaster beauty, 
a more perfect splendor? ‘The sunset itself, all of 
it, is but the cloud-reflected light from a hidden sun. 
And our high moments are times when we have some 
glimpse of the wonder and beauty of God’s world. 
And thus, therefore, it is that these scraps of sunset, 
these moments of vision revealed and declared, show 
us that there is a surrounding universe of light and 
truth and beauty. And it is from these first glimpses 
that men reach on to their fuller knowledge. It is 

348 ! 


A Scrap of Sunset 


from these prophetic splendors that men, by the eye 
and faith, behold the invisible. 

Think for a moment how this is true in the great 
truths of science. They have always been true. 
Men have ever lived in a universe of order and of 
law. But men have not always known these truths. 
One day some man got the first thought of it—caught 
the first glimpse of it. Imagine the gropings of dar- 
ing thought in the mind of the savage as he won- 
ders about the flow of the rivers and the shining stars; 
imagine the world-changing moments when a Coper- 
nicus or a Columbus first compasses in fearless 
thought the idea of a new universe or of continents 
beyond uncharted seas; imagine the world-changing 
moment when a Newton lays hold upon the idea 
of universal gravitation, or when an Edison or an Al- 
exander Bell first realizes that light or sound may 
travel along a wire. Somebody thought it first. 
Everything which we have gained in the world of 
knowledge was one time new. Way back yonder 
some one thought that a stick over a stone could be 
used as a lever to lift heavy weights, or that a log 
could be used for crossing the river to the more de- 
sirable hunting ground on the other side; or that 
sparks from chipped flint might kindle a fire for the 
warming of his fingers or the cooking of his food; 
somebody thought that wheels might be used, that a 

349 


James Percival Huget, D.D. 


fiber of the palm might be woven into cloth for 
garments or for sails which the wind might fill, to 
drive the first ships. Somebody thought that signs 
might be scratched on the rock; that movable letters 
might be used for the printing of books; that steam 
could be harnessed for the driving of engines; that 
healing properties of plants might be used; that an- 
esthetics may be utilized to deaden pain. Somebody 
thought it that sounds have meaning, and that was 
speech; that sounds have rhythm, and that was 
poetry; that sounds may be in tune, and that was 
music. Somebody thought it that men might gather 
together in groups, and that was the tribe; that there 
might be agreement as to customs and traditions, 
and that was government and law; that there is 
power in ourselves that works for righteousness, and 
that was faith and prayer. 

In this realm of religion, not less than elsewhere, 
there have been men of spiritual genius, who first 
thought thoughts of God in the kingdom of the spirit. 
How sublime a poem the First Chapter of Genesis! 
How noble an utterance the Ninetieth Psalm! How 
ageless the beauty of the Song of the Shepherd! 
Each of these great utterances of the spirit, beautiful 
in itself, is as a scrap of sunset, revealing the greater 
glory of the other shining light which truly giveth 
light to every man. 


350 





A Scrap of Sunset 


Now, any man whose eyes are not darkened may 
_ behold the sunset, and any man whose spirit is not 
clouded may have some glimpse of prophetic insight. 
There come to many of us moments of genius when 
we feel deeply and truly, when we see clearly and 
see far. And there come to all of us our times 
of at least some measure of understanding of the 
things of the soul. Why then can we not believe 
in our highest hours? Why can we not trust in our 
flashes of insight when we see above and beyond our 
ordinary vision? 

The Christian should see things, not in seeking for 
signs and wonders, but by the light of a true spiritual 
understanding. He should see the common things 
more clearly, and see their meaning and their beauty. 
He should be prophet and poet. He should be able 
to see the oriole as a scrap of sunset and the sunset 
itself as the gleaming of a universal beauty. And 
above everything else, he should see the great things. 
He should see the goodness and the glory of God. 
He should see the meaning and value of His King- 
dom. He should see Jesus as the fullness of the 
Father’s glory, as the revealer of the Father’s love. 
“He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” It 
is in this sense particularly and greatly that every 
Christian should be a prophet. Not the prophet of 
a magical foretelling or of a mystical pretense, but 


351 


James Percival Huget, D.D. 


the prophet of a clear beholding, of a deep under- 
standing and of a blessed imparting to his fellows of 
that which his eyes have seen and his ears have 
heard of the mysteries of God, that thus to him and 
to his fellow man may be given to receive the ful- 
filling of that promise that he should be given the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the 
face of Jesus Christ. 


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